At Technical Sciences, students are offered two opportunities for doing work/project placements with a company in Denmark or abroad:
The Bachelor of Engineering programmes include a mandatory work placement lasting one semester.
On the MScEng and Master’s degree programmes, students can choose to do a project placement. Duration and ECTS credits vary and are stated in the academic regulations.
It is also possible for students to do their Bachelor’s project and Master’s thesis in collaboration with companies.
Work placements and project placements offer value both for students and for their hosts. For students, it is a chance to apply their knowledge in practice, which may help them decide on their own professional profile and align their expectations about their future working life. At the same time, by doing work placements and project placements, students gain experience that may lead to future job opportunities and help them build networks.
For companies, such collaboration is a way of helping to boost the qualifications of their future workforce within their own field of activity, and students are a valuable source of new ideas, skills and the latest knowledge.
In order to ensure the relevance of work placements and project placements for students, and to ensure the best possible framework for the collaboration, the following roles and procedures have been defined:
The student is assigned a supervisor from the university, who will also act as examiner. In addition, a project supervisor must be assigned by the company/institution where the project is to be carried out.
The student, the supervisor and the company draw up a project contract together, which describes the purpose of the project, defines the topic, includes a supervision and project plan as well as information about the resources that must be made available and deadlines. The contract must be signed by the student, the company and the supervisor, and the head of degree programme must approve the contract before the start of the project.
At the end of the project period, the student prepares an academic assignment, which is assessed at an exam. The requirements for the assignment are stated in the academic regulations.
Afterwards, the project is evaluated in writing using a special evaluation form that is similar to the standard course evaluation form, but supplemented with special project-related questions.
Data from project evaluations is sent to the department management team, the head of degree programme and the director of studies (not to supervisors for reasons of anonymity). The head of degree programme is responsible for looking at the data and initiating relevant discussions with the department management team. The same applies if the director of studies has any comments.
For all compulsory work placements, each student is assigned a supervisor who will help ensure the quality of work placement programme. As a general rule, the supervisor visits the company and the student at least once during the work placement period.
The supervisor is responsible for keeping an eye on whether the work placements are progressing according to plan – and notifies department leadership team and the work placement coordinator if this is not the case. As a cross-cutting quality assurance measure, the director of studies meets annually with the departments’ work placement coordinators to evaluate work placements done over the past year.
Each work placement is finally approved based on a declaration from the host company, a focus report and a work placement report. As part of the work placement report, the student must also evaluate their outcome from the work placement.
If further quality assurance of a work placement is needed, a final work placement dialogue may be held, initiated either by the supervisor or by the student.
