Student engagement

Employability challenges

A chance for students to work on a challenging business problem and put their study experience to the ultimate field test. A company showcases a real-life problem for their business and challenges the interdisciplinary teams to come up with a solution for it. The challenge is typically interdisciplinary, and students are teamed up to ensure a mix of students from different backgrounds. At the end of the week-long challenge, students present their findings to a panel of experts from the company and relevant academics. 

Become an external partner for student employability

Operational Research Challenge

The Operational Research Challenge is an annual event organised by the School in partnership with a company. Open to undergraduate students across the UK with an interest in OR, the challenge involves students acting as consultants to derive a data-driven optimization strategy for a real-world problem posed by the company. In the past, winners of the challenge have been offered a paid internship with the company.

Employability Tuesday

The School invites speakers to showcase different career paths, and help students develop a range of employability skills, in this series of workshops and events for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students, taking place every Tuesday lunchtime during semester time.

This is a great opportunity for relevant companies and speakers to talk to our students about how their day-to-day looks like, how a mathematics background is applied in a job environment, what they are looking for when hiring new positions, and sometimes their graduate programmes and how to apply. 

Students always have the chance to ask questions through the presentation and there is an allocated time for Q&A. 

Some of the great speakers that have taken part include people from the Civil Service, Public Health Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, Arup, Capgemini, Edinburgh Innovations, Merkle Analytics and Moody’s Analytics. Students from other Schools are welcome if relevant, but the events are primarily for mathematics students.

Become an external partner for student employability

Knowledge Exchange & Impact (KEI) seminars

Industry speakers are invited to the School to discuss their challenges with early career researchers and academics, seeking their expertise to tackle their problem.  

The seminars usually comprise presentations followed by Q&A with the speakers and aims to:

• inspire academics to work in Knowledge Exchange and Impact research activities
• provide practical applied examples of where mathematics can help solve societal problems
• to highlight data, collaboration opportunities and funding available to support further research in these areas 

Taught courses

Knowledge exchange is also embedded in several of the taught courses across the taught programmes, namely Modelling, Methodology and Consultancy Skills and Industrial Mathematics. 

The students learn exemplary applications for different problem classes and work in groups on a real-life problem sponsored by a company. 

MSc dissertations

The dissertation project enables students to extend the knowledge and skills already developed during the MSc programme and apply them to real industry problems. In addition to academic research projects, we offer students the chance to work on industry projects in collaboration with an external organisation. These projects enhance the student experience and allow them to work on projects with tangible applications, whilst providing companies access to talented MSc students. Industry projects are jointly supervised with the School.

We offer both MSc dissertations, and consultancy style MSc dissertations, depending on the programme of study.

Become an external MSc dissertation partner

3-6 month PhD internship

PhD students can take industry placements for projects with a duration of 3-6 months. These are typically paid placements which are completed during an interruption of studies. This means that, during this time, the student is an employee of the company rather than a student with us. 

Funded PhD Studentship

Approximately a 3.5 year-long PhD research project, which makes an original contribution to the field, as well as providing training for the student. These studentships are required to have both industrial relevance and academic rigour, as well as industrial financial support.