Looking for Candidates

This page aims to inform companies that wish to offer graduation projects to Master in Business Informatics (MBI) students from Utrecht University.

Students
MBI students are experts on the verge of ICT and business. They are qualified at things such as modeling, development management, business process management, product software, and enterprise resource planning systems. As part of their master program, they are obliged to perform a 7 month study. Since a lot can be learned from practice, we encourage our students to perform a research project within a company.

Research Project Requirements
The research project that a student undertakes must be of sufficient academic level. This means that the student can not be taken on as an extra "set of hands". The student must fullfil his or her academic requirements by achieving some form of scientific contribution. This can be achieved by delivering a model, a survey report, a case study report, or similar. The research is typically built up in phases: the research project definition phase, the execution phase, and the closing phase. In this time the student typically writes a thesis of about 60-200 pages. The student is also expected to write a paper of 10 pages that summarizes the contributions of the work. An exceptional student will present his or her work at an academic conference.

An important note is that a student can not start his or her project unless the project has been approved by the graduation advisor at the university. This ensures that the project is appropriate for our research interests and aligns with the aims and ethics of the university. This is sometimes forgotten by both students and facilitating companies, leading to project cancellation.

Company Requirements
The company contracting the student should be larger than five people, but preferably much larger. We expect from the company that an advisor is provided that takes care of daily supervision and guidance of the student. We also expect the company to take care of the student as if it's a future employee, i.e., the student is provided with a typical safe working environment.

Recruitment
The student can not be recruited by the company before the student has graduated. If the student does indeed sign a contract before the student has received her or his diploma, the company is no longer eligible for receiving students in graduation projects. Furthermore, the graduation project can be terminated, if the company contract leads to a prolonged graduation project (i.e., beyond ten months). On the upside: approximately two thirds of our students are offered a contract by their facilitating companies. Approximately half of those students take the job.

Contracts and Benefits
Typically, students are offered a contract within the company for a period of seven months, with possibilities for a 3 month extension. These contracts typically include some kind of financial reward and some extra budget towards travel expenses and a conference visit.

Advertising your Project If you would like to advertise a project for an MBI student, please send a short description (1-3 paragraphs) of the project in English to graduateMBI@cs.uu.nl. Submissions in Dutch are rejected, since a large portion of our students are international students. At the time of writing we have approximately 50 students graduating per year. We have advertisements from around 100 companies.