Project Proposals

You can propose your own project for your final year project or take on a project proposed by staff. Here we discuss how to write and submit your own project proposal. The process is the same for students and staff members and similar information should be provided in the proposals.

Please see the Project Supervision entry for how to find a supervisor for your own proposal or agree supervision of a staff-proposed proposal.

To submit a new project proposal, log into your PATS account. On the left navigation bar you will see a “My proposals” link which takes you to a section listing your own proposals, adding new proposals, editing or deleting existing proposals and making them available for selection.

To create a new proposal go to the “New Proposal” tab and enter a proposal title and description. If you are a student the proposal will automatically be assigned your degree scheme (Please check in your profile that your degree scheme there is correct and contact the project coordinator if this needs to be amended). Staff should select the degree schemes from a list for which their proposal is suitable.

When choosing a title for your proposal make sure it refers to the core topic of your project. Do not make the title too general (like “A Computer Game”, instead of the specific type of game you wish to write) or providing too much details (“A System to Manage the Selection, Allocation, Deliverable Submission and Marking of Final Year Projects”, instead of “Final Year Project Management”).

In the description of your project briefly give the general context of your project and then describe what you intend to do for the project in detail. Outline the main issues you wish to address with the project and what you intent to produce by the end of the project. Also describe any special resources you need, e.g. non-standard hardware, special software, etc. Staff may also wish to discuss the skills needed to execute the project and the skills that must be acquired during the project.

You may also wish to discuss ideas for projects with staff members who may be interested in supervising this. This can especially be helpful to refine your idea.

In the initial phase of project selection you will only be able to propose projects, but not select projects. This will become available at a later time and will be announced by e-mail. Then student and staff proposals are available for viewing, expressing interest and arranging supervision. See project supervision. Only projects marked as available can be viewed by others during this phase. You can change the availability status of a proposal on pats at any time. Note that proposals selected for supervision will automatically become unavailable. (Members of staff are able to make proposals available again if they think more than one student can in principle work on the project).

You can submit more than one project proposal, but please keep the number of proposals reasonable and rather make sure you write one or two really good proposals. This will make it much more likely that you find a member of staff to supervise your project. Of course you can only do one project and once supervision with a member of staff is agreed via PATS (only staff can choose to supervise a project), this can only be changed in very exceptional cases.

There is no guarantee that there will definitely be a member of staff who will supervise and of the projects you have proposed. This will depend on the quality of your proposal and staff's interest and expertise. Alternatively you can select a staff proposal instead or even despite having made a good proposal, if you are more interested in this.

To a somewhat lesser degree this equally applies to staff proposals - there is no guarantee to find a student who can or wants to do a staff project, not do staff members have to supervise all their own proposals. However, a student who does not select a proposal will be assigned a random member of staff as supervisor.