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Your recommendations should be related to how well you met your objectives. If they were fully met and you are confident of the results you should recommend that the project move on to the next stage. If you have doubts about some of your results, you should say so and why. You need to decide whether your doubts are large enough to say you didn't meet the objectives or not. Then you should suggest what needs to be done to remove those doubts. If you were unable to meet the objectives (perhaps because the instrumentation wasn't accurate enough), you should explain why and give concrete suggestions of what needs to be changed so that they can be met. You should also tell how and why these changes will allow you to meet the objectives. You should not make a recommendation unless you can show how it will enable the company to reach its goals. Thus, if you reached your objective, you shouldn't recommend replacing the equipment because the company is done with the equipment. On the other hand, if you have doubts about some of you conclusions, you might recommend additional experiments using some modified procedure or equipment. In this case you must be able to show that the modification will reduce or eliminate your doubts.

Note: many students stop playing let's pretend at this point and revert to telling me ways that the experiment could be improved. I welcome such comments outside of the report (e-mail, course evaluations, a note, whatever), but not as part of the presentation. Indeed, if you told this to a manager, he'd ask you why you did the experiment the way you did if there is a better way, and you'd look foolish. Remember, in the context of the report we're pretending that YOU selected the experimental procedure and equipment, not the manager.

last update: 01/23/00