Company Support of Student Projects

Our CDT aims to connect industry partners with our staff and students and involve them in proposing and supporting projects of interest.

We’d like to engage industry on a broad front and there are multiple forms that this engagement can take. Our approach is flexible, but our underlying principle is to offer companies benefits in proportion to their own input to a project, or to the CDT in general.

How can companies support PhD projects within the CDT?

Codeplay presentation

1. Financial support of the project

2. In-kind support, including: 

  • development of topics
  • staff time for co-supervision of projects
  • offering the student access to data, equipment or other resources
  • hosting the student for a placement or internship

What can the CDT offer you in return?

1. Appropriately skilled graduates as potential employees

Getting involved in a student project – especially hosting the student for a time – is a great way to build ‘mindshare’ with them and get them thinking about your company, its technologies and markets, before they graduate. At the same time, you can find out how they work and whether they might make a suitable employee post PhD.

2. Intellectual Property (IP)

If you’ve been involved in shaping or supporting a project then its outputs are likely to be of relevance to you. Another part of the quid pro quo of company support for studentships is access to the intellectual property (IP) arising from (and going into) the project. We are flexible in our approach to this, and our underlying principle is always to make the IP offer proportional to the support offer.

 

If you would like to discuss supporting a studentship or otherwise engaging with our CDT, please contact us at: ppar-cdt@inf.ed.ac.uk