Computer Science Placement Handbook for students at the University of Manchester

edited by Duncan Hull, David Petrescu and the School of Engineering placements team

DRAFT version currently under revision, last updated on 09 June, 2025

Welcome to Industrial Experience (IE)

Welcome to the Industrial Experience (IE) placement handbook. This handbook is primarily for undergraduate students studying Computer Science in the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester. The handbook has been written to help you (and your personal tutor) before, during and after your year-long placement in industry.

Figure 0.1: A panoramic picture of the Nancy Rothwell Building, home to the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester

0.1 The Placements Team in Computer Science

The placements team are here to provide support for your Industrial Experience year alongside the support you will get from your employer. The team consists of:

1. Duncan Hull: Employability lead and employability tutor, Computer Science manchester.ac.uk/staff/duncan.hull/contact, see figure 0.3
2. David Petrescu: Placement year tutor for Industrial Experience in Computer Science manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/david-petrescu, see figure 0.3
3. Your personal tutor: in most cases this will be the same personal tutor you had in first year. If you are not sure who your personal tutor is, get in touch with the second year tutor listed in undergraduate handbook (Nutter, 2024) and the Monday Mail (Nutter, 2025)
4. The placements admin team: A group of professional services staff providing adminstrative support in the School of Engineering, see section 11
5. Your employer: Principally your line manager(s), colleagues and Human Resources (HR) department, see chapter 6

Some of the placements team above are pictured in figure 0.3.

0.2 What is an Industrial Experience placement year?

A Industrial Experience (IE) placement is a formal period of paid work that is an assessed part of your study as an undergraduate. (CareersService, 2025i) The length of the employment varies with employers. In this guide a placement (also known a year-in-industry or sandwich year) is a full year of paid employment. Placements take place in the penultimate year of your study, for Bachelors students, that’s after your second year of study and before your final year of study.

• a placement is not a summer internship, although these are also good things to do and lots of students do them
• the usual duration of a placement is 12 months, typically starting between June and August, depending on the employer. At the University of Manchester, the minimum length of employment for placements is 9 months, though 12 months is much more common.

During your placement you are a both full-time student and an employee of an organisation at the same time.

Placements aren’t the only way to get experience before you graduate, but they are one of the most popular. For a discussion advantages and disadvantages of placement years over summer internships see cdyf.me/experiencing#interns (Hull, 2025b)

0.3 Placement year fees for IE

You pay reduced tuition fees for your placement year, these are not the full tuition fees you pay while studying at University full time, although for tax purposes you are still a full-time student, see section 8.7. The fees you pay depend on if you are an international student (or not) see Study Abroad, Placements and Other fees (StudentSupport, 2025e)

0.4 How this handbook is structured

The rest of this placement handbook is structured as follows:

• Chapter 1 outlines the value of a placement for you, your employer and your University
• Chapter 2 describes the aims of your Industrial Experience (IE) year
• Chapter 3 describes the requirements that need to be met for IE
• Chapter 4 discusses placements outside the UK
• Chapter 5 outlines your responsibilities to your employer and the University
• Chapter 6 outlines your employers responsibilities to you
• Chapter 7 outlines what you can expect from the University to you while you are on placement
• Chapter 8 is a starter guide for those finishing their second year of study
• Chapter 9 describes how your placement year is assessed
• Chapter 10 is the guide for your personal tutor who visits you on placement
• Chapter 11 lists all the most important contacts you’re likely to need for your year in industry

0.5 Industrial Experience in dark mode

We often get asked if teaching materials are available in dark mode. The good news is that unlikely some other course materials, this handbook is available in dark mode. If you’re reading this in a web browser, you can choose whatever mode you prefer, see figure 0.2.

Figure 0.2: If you’d prefer to read this handbook in a light on dark colour scheme, move your mouse to the A at the top of the screen and select Night as shown circled in red here. Dark mode works in the web browser only, not the pdf or word version.

0.6 Editing this handbook

We have put a lot of work into making this handbook as useful as possible but we are also human and make mistakes. If you spot any errors or omissions, we appreciate your contributions, corrections and queries. You can do this in several ways outlined below.

EITHER:

• Edit the placement-handbook.docx file, make sure you turn on track changes in Microsoft Word so other editors can see your changes. Please note, the images do not render well in the word document so it should only be used for editing the text, not the images.

OR:

• Edit the source in markdown. That’s all the *.Rmd files available on github (github login required), which are used to generate all the outputs including:
  • the placement-handbook.pdf
  • the placement-handbook.docx, for editors only
  • the placement-handbook.cs.manchester.ac.uk, all the *.html files you see if you are reading this text in a web browser
• Clone or fork the repository github.com/uomcs/placement-handbook, make changes and submit a pull request
• Raise new issues at github.com/uomcs/placement-handbook/issues/new (github login required)
• Email us any updates, see section 0.1

0.7 Academic leads for IE

By your second year, you should have already met us, but in case you’ve forgotten who we are or what we look like, there’s a reminder in figure 0.3

Figure 0.3: Hello and welcome from Duncan Hull (left) employability lead and employability tutor for the Department of Computer Science and David Petrescu (right) Placement year tutor for your Industrial Experience, our contact details are shown in section 0.1

References

CareersService (2025i) What is a placement? https://www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/findjobs/placement.

Hull, D. (2025b) Experiencing Your Future. https://www.cdyf.me/experiencing.

Nutter, P. (2025) The Monday Mail: Your weekly round-up of undergraduate life in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. https://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/mondaymail.

Nutter, P. (2024) Undergraduate Programmes Handbook: Computer Science. https://bit.ly/UG-handbook-2024-25.

StudentSupport (2025e) Study Abroad, Placements and Other fees. https://www.studentsupport.manchester.ac.uk/finances/tuition-fees/fee-amounts/other-fees.