Student Placement Guidelines

Background

Software Engineering (SE) and Electronics & Software Engineering (ESE) students are required to undertake a summer placement of at least 10 weeks to gain relevant practical experience. This placement takes place during the long vacation between the third and fourth (final) years of the degree programme. Students are expected to be treated as normal employees of the organisation with which they are placed but their progress will also be monitored by the Department. At the beginning of the fourth year each student will be expected to give a presentation on their placement experience; this will count as part of the final project work assessment. Although employers are asked to give feedback about a student's performance during the placement they are not involved in the assessment process.

Duration and Payment

The minimum period of employment is ten weeks but students may be prepared to work a little longer, depending on their personal circumstances. Every year many of the students extend their employment period to twelve to fourteen weeks. In response to feedback from employers we have modified the teaching timetable so that students are free from early-June, after their examinations. This means that projects can get started before key company employees possibly go on holiday in July.

Students expect to be paid for the work they carry out during placement and we expect the minimum weekly rate to be about £250 per week in the Glasgow area. Obviously, students working in areas such as the South of England where accommodation costs are higher will need a commensurately higher rate of pay or assistance with accommodation and travel.

The Type of Work

The employer and the Department should agree on a project specification before the commencement of the placement. Each project should have a clearly defined set of goals against which progress can be measured (by the student, the employer and the supervisor!). We want to avoid the situation where the student is involved in a general support role, undertaking useful work but with no clearly defined objectives. However, we do accept that the project objectives may change direction as work develops; this is acceptable provided new goals are identified and agreed. Every project should make use of some aspect of the student's software engineering skills. As a counter-example, employing a student to do data entry is not an acceptable software engineering project!

Our most successful placements have often been at opposite ends of the spectrum of possible projects. At the one extreme, we had two students working for large companies undertaking small, clearly defined pieces of work within large projects; these involved a significant effort to understand the existing situation and then implementation of components to fit within that framework. On the other hand, we had one student who developed a complete software package for a small company, starting from identifying requirements, including a significant user interface design, through to a prototype implementation.

Supervision

Each student is allocated a supervisor within the Department who acts as a point of contact for both the employer and the student. The supervisor will visit the student and employer during the placement to assess progress and discuss any problems. However, the supervisor, or a alternative contact, will be available throughout the placement period for consultation if problems arise at any time.

Our students are strongly motivated to do a good job as this work is part of their degree programme. However, the employer must commit to a reasonable level of supervision of the student. Our students are not sufficiently experienced to be given a project and then left completely to their own devices!

Follow-up Projects

In some cases, the summer placement may generate a follow-up project which the student can undertake as their fourth year individual project. There are two scenarios which we need to consider.

1. A direct follow-up project related to the student's placement work. In this case we need to identify the resources required by the student and what level of dependence there is on the employer. For example, will the student have access to the necessary hardware and software to continue the project? We also need to sort out any questions concerning the copyright of the software which might be produced during the follow-up project. In order to write the report on the project the student will need to use information which may be company confidential, suitable restrictions on the dissemination of such information will have to be agreed. (Only the project supervisor and markers will have to have access to any confidential information.)

2. The work during the placement forms the basis for a final year project but does not directly follow on from the placement work. For example, the student might identify the need for a software tool during the placement work and be interested in prototyping and evaluating the use of a tool for their fourth year project. In this case the employer will have no direct involvement in the project but might be interested in the result.