Thesis Projects as Internships in Industry

To facilitate industry-academia collaborations, the DiSC supports the matchmaking between:

  • companies / organizations who want to offer a thesis topic
  • researchers at VU Amsterdam who are interested in supervising industry theses
  • students who want to conduct their thesis project in industry

Want to propose a project? See the process below!

Process

Companies / organizations use the provided template to create a lightweight description of their project idea. They then send this PDF via email to the scientific coordinators at the DiSC, Justus Bogner (j.bogner@vu.nl) and Filip Ilievski (f.ilievski@vu.nl). The DiSC will then forward it to researchers with suitable expertise, who contact the companies / organizations to create a more concrete project proposal together. Finally, students are recruited, and the projects can start.

disc-thesis-project-process

Prerequisites

  1. The thesis project is in the scope of the DiSC topics. That means that the project is either about improving at least one sustainability dimension (environmental, social, economic, technical) for some form of digital technologies (e.g., software, digital infrastructure, hardware, etc.) or it is about using digital technologies to improve (non-digital) sustainability.
  2. The company / organization provides support for the student to succeed with the project, e.g., in the form of supervision, information, access to data or code, etc., plus at least some financial compensation for their work.

Timeline

To provide enough time for the matchmaking, project proposals should be submitted in August and September, as thesis topics will usually be made available to students in October (MSc) and November (BSc). Later submissions are possible, but finding excellent students will be much more difficult outside the standard thesis cycle. The thesis projects typically start between January and February (MSc) or March and April (BSc).