A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
The benefits for students of spending a year applying and developing their research skills in industry or with partner institutions around the world are manifold. These experiences have the potential to transform a student’s outlook and personal development one of the key aspects being the confidence gained through the opportunity to prove to themselves that they have the capability to make genuine contributions to research by applying the knowledge and skills gained during the foregoing parts of their degree programme. This paper will present an example degree programme structure which enables the incorporation of this type of experience within a 5 year integrated Masters programme in Chemistry (MChem). The benefits of placing such experiences in the penultimate year enabling students to benefit from their new-found confidence and self-knowledge during the final year studies will be presented. The issues around the involvement of external supervisors in the assessment of students’ performance and project reports and the ways in which their contributions can be benchmarked and calibrated against the home institution’s standards and practice will also be discussed.
