Individual Project Report Submission
We request that students write up their findings in a final report, to be written as if it is to be submitted as a research paper. The final report should be uploaded to this page by Friday 4th September 2026 (unless by special arrangement with the examiners for a later submission).
Preparing the report as a paper does not mean that you are expected to have produced a publishable body of impactful work and polished it to perfection. Instead, the point is to learn how to structure and present your work as a narrative.
The writeup should be around 5-10 pages, formatted as if for submission to a journal, and should contain a similar level of detail in the background and introduction to a typical research paper in its field. That normally implies that it will have
i) a brief introduction with key literature references and background that underpins the paper,
ii) a methodology section that refers to other published work where appropriate, rather than trying to explain all details from scratch,
iii) a detailed results and discussion section that highlights and explains key findings,
iv) conclusions and plans for further work.
Supervisors are requested to keep the level of proof-reading of text minimal, so that it represents the students’ work rather than theirs, while advising on content, format, presentation of graphs etc (like they might for an undergraduate project, rather than for a collaborative paper). The report will form the basis of discussion in the viva, and we would be delighted if students then continued to expand on the work such that it was eventually published.
As discussed above, the report must provide information to enable full reproduction of at least one relevant result from the work, e.g. through supplementary material detailing steps to achieve this. This could entail downloading a ‘protocol’ script from an online repository (note: this does not have to be made public), compiling or locating binaries for any packages required, and running it on SCRTP hardware. This can involve some calculations, but these should be possible within moderate computational resources available to anyone in the CDT, eg a node of the hetmathsys set, ideally for no more than a few hours. For anything requiring more compute than this, pre-processed results should be provided. A reasoned estimate of the uncertainty and/or error of this chosen result must also be provided in the report. This is necessary to allow the peer-to-peer assessment as part of the PX915 module.