MSc Individual Research Project
- Project aims and deliverables
- Project schedule 2024-2025
- Selection and allocation of projects
- Ordering Hardware for your project
- Writing and submitting Initial Project report and Final Project report
- Poster presentations
- Project Assessment
- Plagiarism
- Important note on external projects
- Useful links and samples of past projects
- Library Support
The aims of undertaking an individual research project are to give you:
- an opportunity to carry out research to deepen your knowledge and develop your skills regarding an area in which you have a special interest
- an opportunity to develop your skills regarding report writing and presentations
- experience of managing a project
You should contact your supervisor every week or so, perhaps just by email, to report your progress. It is wise to type up your work as you do it. This will help you when you have to write reports, including your final report. In addition, it gives you something to show your supervisor and will help monitoring your progress and rapid detection of any errors. Bear your deadlines for deliverables in mind throughout the project. If you have any serious problems with your project, please inform the MSc Programme Director.
Deliverables
- an initial written report covering the background, specification and milestones for your project. This is an unassessed 1-2 page compulsory submission giving the aims and objectives of the project, a literature review and contents page. Its purpose is to ensure all students are engaged with their project work.
- a high-quality final technical report
- a poster presentation on the project
Main work on Individual Research Project with the following submission deadlines and skills training: between last week of May and first week of September.
- 6th November – all project proposals from staff posted on lists.
- 13th November – meetings with supervisors to discuss proposals and to be signed off as suitable.
- 6th December 14:00 – deadline for submission of 1st round selection project preference. For those not obtaining 1st round projects, 2nd round will be in the following week
- Initial work on the project to take place part-time throughout the Spring Term:
- Submission of Initial Project Report: Monday 10 March 2025 by 4pm.
- Full-time work on the project starts after the last exam (usually by late May) and ends mid September.
- Students must maintain on campus attendance during this period. Remote project work is not allowed.
Support sessions available throughout the year:
- Preparing for your MSc Project (run Central Library) - Wednesday 29th Jan 2025 and Wednesday 21st May 2025 in room 408. You only need to attend one of the sessions.
- Webinar: Presenting your Research by Poster (run by Graduate school) - Wednesday 18th June 2025 . Room: 408. Book our spot via Inkpath by TBC 2025.
- Turnitin Library Session: Wednesday 6th August 2025, 11:00-12:00. Room 408.
Submission deadlines
- Electronic Version of Poster: Thur 4th September 2025 by 4pm
- Final Project Report: Thur 11th September 2025 by 4pm
- Poster Presentation: Monday 15th September 2024: 11:00-13:00 or 14:00-16:00.
Your MSc will be allocated a time slot closer to the presentation date.
Project proposals by staff will be issued by mid-November for you to make an online selection.
A project may consist of, for example, an integrating review, the use of existing theory for some particular application, investigation of design techniques, a detailed extension of existing theory or a deeper investigation into a laboratory experiment. While new concepts are not required from students, originality of presentation and evidence of understanding in depth are required.
Proposing your own project
Students wishing to propose their own projects should send an initial draft proposal to their MSc Course Director by the end of October. The Course Director will then attempt to find a supervisor for the proposal who (if necessary) will collaborate with the student to prepare, by the middle of November, an acceptable proposal related to the proposal submitted.
If you are considering a project in industry, so an external project, please read the notes within this page about exernal projects.
Allocation of projects
The aim is to allocate projects around the first week of December, so that students can start part-time work on the project fairly early in the Spring term.
Any student who has developed (perhaps with the help of a member of staff) a satisfactory self-proposed project will be allocated that project. Students will be allocated a project (if possible their first choice) via a web-based system.
The secenario for students wishing to do an external project is more complicated. Once a student has found an external project that is acceptable to the Programme Director, negotiations regarding the legal agreement sometimes continue until a few days before the project is scheduled to start in the external organisation (normally in late May). In these cases, we shall try to allocate work related to the external project which can be begun at the start of the Spring term and which can form a back-up project in case the negotiations fail.
Please review the Project Ordering Procedure for more information on ordering hardware for your project.
Orders will need to be placed via the Stores online Order Form from College’s preferred supplier list. Watch a video on how to complete the stores ordering form.
Expense Claims (by approval only)
Please submit your electronic MSc Initial Project Report in a PDF format by 4:00pm, Monday 10th March 2025.
The maximum length of the report is 2 pages and this should summarise the aims of the project, some background material and relevant references. Submission of the report is compulsory, but the report itself is not assessed and is only used for us to identify potential critical cases and make sure that all students are engaged with their project work.
Final MSc Project reports must be submitted in pdf format by 16:00 BST, Thursday 11th September 2025.
- Initial Project instructions (tbc)
- Poster Submission instructions (tbc)
- Read a comprehensive guide to the layout and content of reports
- MSc Project report template (latex). Simply click on “Open as Template”. This will open the file in your Overleaf account to be edited. Imperial College provides a Premium overleaf account to anyone with an Imperial email. More information about the Premium account is available here https://www.overleaf.com/edu/imperial
- Project Submission Instructions
Please see Centre for Academic English webpage to see the various support sessions they offer to help you communicate your research.
Projects will be partly assessed by poster presentation sessions. During the Poster Sessions you should be prepared to explain your project, and answer any questions, to members of the academic staff . The weighting of this presentation session (and/or interview) will be 15% of the overall project mark.
Posters
- Please submit your FINAL electronic MSc poster as a PDF file by 16:00 (BST), Thursday 4th September 2025.
- MSc Poster Submission Instrcutions (to be updated) via the app
- MSc poster template. Please use the Imperial College A1 portrait research poster template, Downloadable template and guidance.
- Poster Presentations will take place 15th September 2025 in the College Main Entrance
11:00-13:00 and 14:00-16:00 - your MSc time slot will be assigned closer to the presentation date
Presentation skills
Students will attend a mandatory presentation skills course. The session will not be recorded.
Mastering Presentations: Presenting your Research by Poster - TBA. Book our spot via Inkpath.
Your project will be assessed by your supervisor and a further examiner and has the following weighting - 85% report and 15% poster presentation. The following aspects of your project will be taken into account.
- Your performance regarding: Project management, Understanding of the background and context, Initiative, Perseverance in dealing with difficulties, Theoretical, computational and practical achievements
- The technical content of your report
- The size and quality of the part of your project report that could be published in a reputable conference proceedings or journal
- Any special factors contributing to performance on the project
- (in the case of external projects) the report(s) from the external organisation
The Programme Director will moderate all the project marks to try to ensure consistency of marking. An External Examiner (from another university) helps to oversee this process.
This MSc project assessment table gives an indication of the requirements for a report of pass quality, of merit quality and of distinction quality.
Plagiarism and your project
The College's formal position on examination offences is detailed in the Cheating Offences Policy and Procedures, which lists what the College categorises as cheating and thus completely unacceptable.
Plagiarism is the presentation of another person's thoughts, words or images and diagrams as though they were your own, and is a form of cheating. This must be avoided, with particular care in coursework, essays, reports and projects written in your own time and also in open and closed book written examinations.
You must read and understand what constitutes plagiarism when preparing your project report. You should also have completed Ensusring Integrity I: Plagiarism Awareness (Master's Students) by 31st October.
The procedures can be found at Plagiarism, Academic Integrity & Exam Offenses section.
Please read the Department Plagiarism Committee Basic Principles in Assessed Coursework.
Definition and more information can be found on Library's dedicated Plagiarism Awareness for Master's students webpage.
Use of conversational AI tools
We would like to share with you our department’s guidance regarding the use of conversational AI tools like ChatGPT. Such tools can provide great opportunities to enhance your learning, but also can lead to undesirable results given misuse or poor understanding of their limitations.
The Department sees value on the use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in the preparation of submitted work. It is expected that all primary sources used in the submission must be cited - such primary sources do not include AI tools. You should be aware that you will be thoroughly examined on the understanding of what you have written and that examiners attach great importance to the coherence of your submitted work.
Please be aware that:
- ChatGPT provides relatively low-level text where, although the text makes sense, it misses the depth of understanding that is expected to be present in your work, and it is prone to providing wrong information.
- Presenting work as if it were your own is plagiarism and is a form of cheating. This includes AI-generated content.
The College has established a working group to explore the opportunities and implications that these tools can offer in your education, and we are waiting to see their findings. Their current guidance can be found on the conversational AI tools webpage
updated 25 May 2023 to include information on conversational AI tools
Students wishing to carry out their project as an intern with a suitable company should contact the Programme Director by the end of October. Such projects will be called external projects. They can only be undertaken with the permission of the Course Director. An academic supervisor from Imperial College will be allocated and the student must keep in contact with the academic supervisor by email throughout the project. The external organisation must sign an agreement with the College and the student.
Undertaking an external project is, in general, more risky than undertaking a project within the department owing to the increased uncertainty of all aspects the project, however it can be useful experience.
Projects as interns in industry
We do not have a system for finding such projects for you, however, students from French Universities can usually use the systems provided by their universities. Sometimes students find projects using the web. Once a student has found a project offered by a company, please submit the details to the Programme Director. If it is acceptable, a legal agreement has to be formulated and signed by the company, Imperial College and the student before the student can start the project. An essential condition of the agreement is that the report on the project must be put in the public domain, by being entered into the College Library, within a maximum of two years of submission of the report. Any delay must be approved by the College before the project is begun.
Not surprisingly, companies might be reluctant to sign such an agreement and negotiations regarding such agreements sometimes continue until a few days before the project is scheduled to start (normally in late May). Students need to inform the company immediately of the need to sign such an agreement and the condition on the project report going into the public domain because it is best to determine as soon as possible whether the company will be able to accept these conditions. An electronic version of the document can be downloaded from the MSc web-page for sending to the company concerned. It is essential to keep the Course Director informed of all activity concerned with trying to find a suitable internship.
- Online project selection and allocation
- Project and Poster submission (includes Turnitin)
- MSc Project report template (latex). Simply click on “Open as Template”. This will open the file in your Overleaf account to be edited. Imperial College provides a Premium overleaf account to anyone with an Imperial email. More information about the Premium account is available here https://www.overleaf.com/edu/imperial
- Examples of highly-rated past projects
The Library runs practical support sessions to help with the literature review/writing part of your project, covering:
• Advanced search tools to find research papers
• Use of reference management software (Refworks) to collect reference details and automatically generate your reference lists
• Reference management for LaTeX users using BibTeX
The above topics will be covered in Preparing for your MSc Project session in Jan & May. See your Calendar.
The above topics will be covered in Preparing for your MSc Project sessions
Plagiarism and mandatory course online
All MSc Students must do an online Plagiarism Course (find out more here) The deadline for completing the online plagiarism course for MSc students is 31 October. Your results will be withheld if you do not complete this course.
Plagiarism will usually be detected (we have electronic systems such as Turnitin which can do this) and will normally result in failure of the project and degree. MSc dissertations are assessed in part on your ability critically to appraise the literature. That will normally be exhibited in the background Chapter(s).
A note on using quotations: Where another author has put all that you wish to say in an acceptable manner, it is then appropriate to quote him verbatim, but please see the information on Plagiarism on the main project page. You should indicate that it is a quotation, by using inverted commas ("...") around quoted phrases. A good approach is to indent the quoted passage - this is particularly so when it is a lengthy quote. Remember to give the reference to the original work and the author! Figures taken from other work should also be acknowledged by giving the reference (page numbers to be included whenever possible).
Bibliography/ references
The bibliography consists of a list of all the books, articles, manuals etc. used in the project and referred to in the dissertation. You should provide enough information to allow the reader to find the source. You should give the full title and author and should state where it is published, including full issue number and date, and page numbers where necessary. In the case of a text book you should quote the name of the publisher, place of publicationBe consistent in the way that you write them and give all necessary details, so that the references can be easily located e.g.
1) J.E. Carroll, “Technical Writes and Wrongs”, Electronics and Power, vol. 25, no.4 pp.256-258, April 1979, doi:10.1049/ep.1979.0166.
2) J. van Emden and J. Easteal, “Dear Sir or Madam”, Electronics and Power, Vol. 31, no.4, pp. 291-294, April 1985, doi: 10.1049/ep.1985.0187
The bibliography should contain keys to allow specific references where appropriate. Use numeric [1] or AuthorDate [Cla06] keys. RefWorks is a web-based reference management tool that will maintain bibliographic references automatically. It can be integrated with Word and you can edit/export references in BibTeX format to use with LaTeX. Manual references are also fine and may be more appropriate given the time constraints of the project. For more help with referencing, please see the Library webpage and speak to your EEE Librarian.