In case you have a project idea which involves collaboration with an external industry partner (e.g. the company where you did you Year 3 placement), the first step is to find and contact a suitable Supervisor, as they will need to agree to supervise your project as ‘student-generated’.
An industry partner should be aware that the project will be assessed through reports and presentations by academic first and second markers, as well as reviewed by the project supervisor. If your project involves the use of strategically sensitive data or technologies, or there is potential for new intellectual property, a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) may be necessary.
Student-partner NDAs are managed by the College, not the School. If this applies to your project, please reach out to Freddie and Andy, and they will help you connect with the appropriate team to handle the NDA process.
If there is a strong alignment, rank the project and submit an expression of interest for the Academic-generated project. However, if there are any differences, it’s recommended to connect with the Academic to clarify the scope and flexibility of the brief. Together, you can determine whether a new project title and brief should be created.
In your project, you should aim to address a clearly definable situation. This doesn’t have to be a ‘current issue’; it could be in response to a potential opportunity or an emerging challenge.
Review the assessment criteria - if your project brief will allow you to demonstrate meeting these criteria, then your project aligns with expectations. If you remain unsure, discuss the matter with your Project Supervisor or Freddie and / or Andy.
Your Masters project must be a standalone, original piece of work to meet academic conduct requirements. Only work conducted specifically as part of the Masters project will be considered for assessment. You may reference data or findings from other College-related assignments, but these should be cited appropriately, just as you would with any third-party source.
You cannot submit for credit in one module work that has been submitted for credit in another. Make sure that the Master’s project is a self-contained response.
Projects submitted that have been marked as student proposed haven’t been included in the project list on Blackboard. The projects submitted by colleagues linked to a student are kept internally.
The listed projects have been developed by the School’s Academics, with some initiated in collaboration with academic, institutional, or industry partners.
Review staff profiles to learn about their experience and research interests. Additionally, browse the published list of projects to identify potential Supervisors who have relevant expertise in your area of interest.
It’s not first come first served. All allocations will be made after student and staff rankings are in. (see Timetable)
We recommend you rank 5 or 6 projects although you can rank up to 10. After the Student Rankings closes, supervisors will be able to see which students chose their projects and rank them in order of preference.
The module leads will then run an automatic program to match Supervisors with students. We have had very good success with this in previous years.
For a self-generated project, you must find a Project Supervisor who is willing to oversee your work.
You and they rank projects in the same way as academic generated projects. There’s no obligation for either party to put this at the top of the list.
Scope your self-generated project concepts with potential Project Supervisors: i.e. discuss the scope of work with Academics, who have domain expertise relevant to your concept.
After the Student Rankings closes, Supervisors will be able to see which students chose their projects and rank them in order of preference. The module leads will then run an automatic program to match Supervisors with students. We have had very good success with this in previous years.
If you are in the supervisor’s top choices within their capacity and the project is your top rank, you will be matched together.
Your Project Supervisor should offer feedback and guidance throughout the project. However, you are responsible for directing the project on a day-to-day basis, not the Supervisor.
You should aim to meet with your Supervisor up to once a week, although there may be times when meetings are skipped or postponed. It’s recommended not to go more than two or three weeks without checking in.
Your Project Supervisor will also provide context on the quality of your work to the first Assessor, supporting the summative assessment process.
You can expect 30m per week, or 1h per fortnight individually as a baseline for supervision.
Your Project Supervisor is not responsible for summative assessment of your project work. However, they play a crucial role in your success by guiding you through the project and providing regular feedback. Additionally, Project Supervisors nominate and provide context on the quality of your work to the first Assessor, contributing to the summative assessment process.
A15: If you are unable to resolve issues with your Supervisor, please reach out to Freddie and/or Andy, and we will help mediate a resolution
Your project report is submitted up to two weeks before the Oral Examination. Assessors will review your report in preparation for the oral examination. Your project is assessed through both your report and oral examination using the single rubric provided in the handbook.
The Report and oral examination are the modes by which you demonstrate your meeting of the assessment criteria. There is no individual mark for either component individually, only for the project response as a single item, as evidenced by the report and oral examination.
The report and oral examination themselves are observed in the Communication learning outcome.
See the AI Policy section of the handbook.
Summary: You can use AI, but need to reference it as a third party source. You must also be able to stand by the content of your submission. It is you who is writing the report on your response to your brief, and who will be orally examined on its content. Be cautious in uncritically accepting suggestions from a system that cannot tell you how many Rs in the word strawberry.
We aim to do this within one week of projects being allocated.
This is likely to vary from one project to another and so we recommend you seek guidance from your Project Supervisor.
You should be able to go deeply into the detail you have been working on. But the context and positioning should be accessible to an academic reader not from the domain.
No to both. The abstract is a self-contained executive summary of the approach and outcomes of the paper; it stands outside the main body and is placed in the front matter. Students will want to acknowledge support in their paper, but will be competing for space for text that they rely on for demonstrating assessment criteria. To relieve this, acknowledgements are excluded and to be included in either the front or back matter.
All results and must be presented in the main body of the report as well as anything you are relying on to meet assessment criteria. The oral examination will allow examiners to probe further, clarify, and discuss aspects that you have reported on.
Some of the assessment criteria such as project management or personal reflection may seem alien in a scientific report, but are a part of the Design Engineering Master’s Project report submission. As above these should be included in the main text. You may wish to opt for a short self-contained section on each.
If a figure or table is directly referenced and contributes meaningfully to the discussion or analysis, it must appear in-line with the relevant text to maintain clarity and coherence. Figures should be labelled such that they can be referred to in the main text (e.g. Fig. 1.2). It’s bad practice to have floating items that are not referred to in the main text body.
Appendices, or Supplementary Information, are additional resources that supports the main text body, but that you are not relying on for the main body to be a self-contained piece of scientific communication. You don’t need to include any. And there is no guarantee an examiner will read them. Like figures and tables, they should be referred to in the main text to give the examiners the opportunity to view them. You may link out to external resources you’ve used such as data and code repositories, project management tools, notebooks etc. Please make sure your assessors are able to access any resources you rely on at submission time without them requiring any external accounts.