Research topic dilemma🤒

I’ll be starting my final year November 2021. Alas!! I am at the final stage of my undergraduate study. I have gone through my course outline for the first semester and everything seems to be okay for me except…….. Research. 

I am studying for an undergraduate degree in building construction and there are a lot of great research topics to pursue but I am confused on the best research topics to select from. In order to rescue myself from this dilemma, I started a campaign to study two research papers every day and although it is turning out to be more fun than I expected it to be (I initially thought that reading research papers, publications and journals will be very boring), I think I am worse than when I started and this is why; Reading thesis, articles, literature reviews have broaden my scope of what I want to centre my research on.  

Before starting my two research papers a day campaign, it is safe to say I had interest in just about a couple of research fields, now I have interest in dozens of research fields and they all seem interesting to me. My course is structured is such a way that students can choose any of the following fields to major in during final year; Construction Management, Building Structures, Building Maintenance, and Building services. I have decided to specialize in construction management come resumption but this decision hasn’t helped me in choosing my research topic. Some students might wait till resumption before getting their research topic ready but I like staying ahead of my calendar so I can have more time to focus on other things whenever the session is on. Initially I thought of centering my research on “how time, cost and quality of buildings affect the management of building project” but on further research, I noticed that a lot of publications has been made on that subject topic and subjects relating to the topic this, a lot of solutions have been recommended by researchers and authors as regards the three big players in construction (time, cost and quality)

Construction materials

I made a couple of calls and one of my mentors advised that I should do a research on construction materials but personally, I don’t like studying about construction materials because of how deep their study can go. I’ll have to study the physical properties, chemical properties, material properties, bonding characteristics and many more. I don’t bond well with chemistry and because of this, I totally avoid anything that will make me go back to my chemistry textbooks. 

Sustainability of buildings

This is a very interesting research field, but for some weird reasons, I don’t what to base my undergraduate research on this. It isn’t that I don’t like the topic idea, as a matter of fact, I am advocate for sustainable development goals and I am also a member of SDG groups in my university. I think I’d prefer writing on this topic during my post graduate study. 

Building Information Modeling

Building information modelling (BIM for short) is currently one of the most progressing trend in the construction industry. its technologies are becoming more used day by day and it is unique to the construction industry unlike cloud computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, autonomousrobotics and other digital technologies that are common in other industries. BIM is a software tool and system that allows creating an intelligent object and dimension 3-D oriented object model and allows the workability of smart workflows around it. It is used for visualisation of real world objects, coordination among project stakeholders and used to save time, cost and error throughout the entire project life cycle. This is one of the fields that i will most likely based my research on but then again, finding the right topic in this field has also been an issue. 

Construction 4.0 and Industry 4.0

Anyone who has an idea of what industry 4.0 is can try to imagine what construction 4.0 will be. The term industry 4.0 is also a go to word for modern researchers looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their respective industry using the digital technologies that comes with the fourth industrial revolution. I read a literature review on “impact of Industry 4.0 platform on the formation of construction 4.0 concept” by Maria Kozlovska, Daria Klosova and Zuzuna Srukova and got a lot of research ideas from the literature review. The authors advised that further research should be made on the construction 4.0 and based on further readings, I discovered that there are very little publications as regards construction 4.0 especially in my country

I’ll continue to read more research papers with focus on BIM technologies and Construction 4.0 so I can come up with a unique project topic.  I know that anyone who has ever undergone research can relate to the dilemma I am currently facing. I hope you learn a thing or two about construction from this article.

feel free to comment on how you were able to overcome this dilemma 😔