What is SpaceProjects.uk?
In the final or penultimate year of your degree you’ll have to complete a lengthy individual project. Often the choice of topics is limited and you might not get something that excites you. Here, you can find a project proposed by a space organisation.
What are the benefits?
Through a collaboration, you have a lot more to gain compared to a standard project, and will draw on the benefits during and after your degree.
It’s part of your degree, plus you get…
Practical experience – try out your ideas and knowledge in a real life project
New skills – learn how to do work alongside a professional organisation
Professional experience – gain experience that will strengthen your professional profile
Job insights – discover what you might want to work in after graduation and improve your job prospects
Tell me more…
The key to making this a success is you being proactive and thorough in communicating with your university. Your university will want to make sure that the scope of the project fulfils the intended learning outcomes for your project module, and you’ll have to find an academic supervisor before you can apply to a project. This could take a while, so start the conversations early!
Remember, there are two ways projects are assigned:
Route 1: you, the student, apply for the project directly after talking to your university about the suitability of the project for your research module.
Route 2: An academic at a university applies for the space project, and later chooses a student who they think would be suitable for the project. As a student, this route will of course depend on the project being awarded to an academic at your university, so you may wish to ask your potential supervisors to apply.
If you are going down route 1, some things that will be useful to find out from your university:
- Deadline for project selection/definition in your research module
- Rough start/end dates of your research module
We recommend talking to your module lead and your head of department. Your department may already have specific rules in place for this sort of collaboration so it’s worth researching these beforehand.
During the project, you’ll have an academic supervisor from your department, who will advise on the general processes related to completing the project, and a supervisor from the organisation you’re working with, who will guide you through the technical completion of the project and who you can ask specific questions related to the project content.
Scheme Handbook
All the details about the scheme are provided in the handbook. Make sure to read it carefully! Please read it carefully and get in touch if you have any questions.
PDF version: Link
Selection Process
If you are a student applying directly for a SpaceProject, your application may first be considered by the SpaceProjects team, who will shortlist applicants, before sending those on to the host company who will conduct the final selection.
In our initial selection, one of the main things we want to see is your ability to take the initiative, as this is one of the key factors that will determine the success of the project.
Testimonials
“I would say that undertaking a project with a company allowed me to deeper understand how university learning could be applied in real-world engineering environments. The ability to meet regularly with Space Forge helped to give my project structure, and allowed me to learn from them and bounce my ideas off of others prior to submitting my final report. It was particularly useful to be given a set of requirements at the start of my project to shape my research, and this allowed me to explore areas I might not have thought of myself. Completing this project in partnership with Space Forge also gave me a unique motivation when getting overwhelmed with university deadlines – the idea that something I designed could one day go to space really pushed me to keep searching for new ideas. I was lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to continue my project after submitting my dissertation and it’s been extremely rewarding so far to explore how to bring my largely theoretical dissertation to life, and get some practical engineering experience after the past two years of primarily online learning!”
– Katherine Addo, University of Strathclyde, who worked with Space Forge on the project “Heat flux sensor for reusable re-entry vehicle”.
Contact
If you have any questions at any point, get in touch with us at spaceprojects@ukseds.org