In a graduate product design class I took, our semester project was to design and build and make cost estimates for development of an IOT product. "Internet of things" wasn't a phrase yet, but that's what you'd call it today. We had to incorporate these ultra low power sensor/processor things the professor had his name on and he was a big promoter of. At the beginning of the semester his grad assistant presented her invention from a previous year, which she won awards for and had presented and written about and was part of her PhD work. It was a home health monitoring device and she showed plots of a month of data from sampling herself (pointing out she was the only woman on her project). It was very inspiring and I was very impressed by her. Jump to mid-semester, I randomly have a team of MBA students and me; the three of them were going to do all of the writing and I just had to do all of the engineering by myself (yay). I'm battling in the lab for hours trying to get the damn thing to read a voltage. I keep putting time of the GA's calendar for help, and she keeps blowing me off or passing me in the hall and saying "ummm maybe try this?" or she'd give me another device to see if the last was defective. In principle, she should have been able to point out whatever I was doing wrong in 15minutes or less, but weeks of this avoidance went on. Eventually, after asking everyone in the department where she was and letting people know I was trying to meet with her and just sitting at her desk at our appointed time for over an hour waiting, she caught me in a hall, conspicuously looked both ways to see that nobody was around, and said "look, the things don't work. They've never worked. My device never worked. I made up the plots based on what they theoretically should have been if the product worked. I'm grading the projects. Just focus about the write-up of the business plan." So my work was done. And at the end of the semester, nobody's product worked, but most people acted like theirs did. Ours obviously didn't work, but we made up some shit about it being a mock-up because we didn't have the budget for some of the components. ... A professional photographer took shots of my team that were used in promotional material for the school.