DCU Business School Practicum 2021 - Submissions Invited
As part of DCU Business School's on-going commitment to work with industry, the school has several opportunities for client companies to engage with our postgraduate students in 2021 in the Practicum process. In the past companies that have engaged with us have found the process to be invaluable and below are some testimonials from previous clients.
What is a Practicum?
A Practicum project is intended to afford postgraduate students the opportunity to exercise their creative, questioning, analytical, problem solving, and communication skills in a focused and practical manner, and to further facilitate deep learning on the Masters programme. It is also intended to expose the student to a realworld problem to allow the conceptual and theoretical work covered in the earlier modules, including undergraduate courses completed, to be put into practice. It is an academic exercise, and is seen as an essential component of our Masters programme. The practicum is not an opportunity to undertake consultancy or other work for your company, but intended to expose our students to real world issues that may be arising in a business, and apply their learning to solving the same. The students together with their academic supervisor are responsible for establishing what exact work is to be done and how it is undertaken. All dealings with client companies are confidential and students will provide an NDA agreement for signature at the outset.
Every practicum features the following elements:
- A Literature Review
- Primary Research and the development of a series of actions/plans based on this research
- An Applied Element which takes the above learning and forms this into a plan with their client
The first two activities occur between February and April 2021, and the last activity happens in June and July 2021. During the summer months students are expected to work in teams, up to 35 hours per week on the
project. The practicum represents approx. 1,000-1,200 hours of work by the students, based here in the Glasnevin Campus.
There is no financial outlay expected by your company, however some companies have provided budgets for specific areas of work in the past. We do ask however, that you meet your student team at least once per month throughout the process.
The areas of work we are specifically looking towards include this list is not exhaustive):
- Traditional Marketing (we do not include Digital Marketing on these programmes)
- Business Strategy
- A Feasibility Study
- Problem Analysis
- Product/Market Assessments
- Business Plan Development
- Business Model Exploration
- Start-up investigations
- Consumer Research/Branding.
Submissions for projects are to be made through this Google form by 22 December.
Once we have gathered all potential projects, we carefully allocate them to student teams, bearing in mind the student requests for areas of interest to work in. In some cases, companies submitting potential projects are not
successful in being allocated a student team, but we do our utmost to include unsuccessful companies in other opportunities that may arise in the University.
“It gave us a really in depth analysis of our company”. Neil Dowling - Event Ease Ireland
“Great engagement and preparation for meetings - really drove the agenda, particularly given the broad scope we outlined. The research was quite comprehensive and the writing quality high.” Ciaran Treanor - Sonalake
“We are currently utilising some of the feedback from the students as we work our way through this change in business direction”. David Craig – Dublin Design Studio