Get involved
The University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha is at the forefront of teaching, learning, research and innovation.
By working with UC, you’ll gain access to some of the world’s best minds and contribute to ground-breaking projects and the education of future industry leaders.
UC FoundX
UC is proud to support a mature and growing ecosystem for our entrepreneurial students and their innovative ideas, enabling them to take an idea and make it real. UC FoundX supports and celebrates this ecosystem by inviting alumni to pledge their philanthropic support in the future and to be involved with the Centre for Entrepreneurship.
UC Careers for recruitment of students and graduates
Great businesses are built on great ideas and great people, and UC is in the business of creating both. Our students and graduates are your future employees and leaders. Your help is needed, as employers and managers, to provide them with employment and internship opportunities.
UC Careers makes it easy to recruit some of New Zealand's top recent and future graduates for internships, research, work-integrated learning and project work, and voluntary and paid employment.
We can help with every step of the recruitment process from advertising a vacancy or opportunity and conducting interviews.
- To discuss how you can employ UC graduates visit the website of our Careers, Internship and Employment team
Industry Collaboration
UC Civil & Natural Resource Engineering
All Bachelor of Engineering with Honours students complete a Final Year Project.
The projects could fall within any of the civil engineering disciplines including architectural, earthquake, ecological/hydrological, energy, environmental, fire, fluid mechanics, geomechanics, management, materials, structural, and transportation. From 2017 some projects will be sponsored by engineering firms. While working on a real-world problem, students will be learning all the competencies they will need to practice as a professional after graduation.
Projects can include an oral presentation, poster presentation (see below for a selection of award-winning posters) and submission of a written paper.
A conference of Final Year Projects is held each year in October. The conference attempts to emulate the type of environment of a real research conference attended by professional engineers or and researchers. In keeping with our intention to emulate a real conference there will be an invited keynote speaker to launch the conference. Industry guests will also be invited to the conference. The conference is open to the public and we strongly recommend that anyone considering studying the BE(Hons) comes along to see the variety of work our students are involved in.
UC Computer Science & Software Engineering
All Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Software Engineering students are required to complete a final year research project. Sponsoring a final year project offers industry partners the opportunity to develop a project of use to their organisation which has a much greater value than the donation we require.
Research projects could be a backburner plan that lacks funding or an extension to a current project with the potential to add significant value.
UC Dept of Mechanical Engineering
We work with industry to solve industry-relevant problems. Leverage our engineering expertise to take your technological innovation to the next level through partnerships ranging from final year student R&D projects, to postgraduate projects subsidised by government grants, or engage an academic consultant for highly technical problems.
Final Year R&D Projects
All Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics Engineering students are required to do a final year R&D project. The projects are generated by industry partners and meet their R&D needs. The project value is normally equivalent to a $40,000-$100,000 development in exchange for a small donation from sponsoring companies.
Each team is comprised of four students, an academic supervisor and a mentor from industry who will work together to develop a product, solve a problem, build and test prototypes or make predictive models of processes. Students have access UC’s laboratories and equipment, computing facilities and technical staff. Academic staff coach the students in planning, budgeting, and problem-solving. Sponsors provide some level of technical guidance and direction. Any IP developed as part of the project belongs to the industry sponsor. Outputs also include a progress report, a final report, and an oral presentation.
Recent sponsors include Hamilton Jet, Springfree, Kiwirail, Methanex, Air New Zealand, Fonterra and Fisher &Paykel Healthcare and Appliances. Past projects have spanned areas including bioengineering, medical devices, healthcare and rehabilitation; motorsport, aviation, defence and transport; agriculture, irrigation, crop protection and viticulture; energy management, power systems and wind generation; process optimisation and food processing; surface treatments and material design; and public facilities.
Employ a UC Graduate
UC students graduate from a university ranked in the top 250 in the world. In many fields such as process engineering, finance, accounting and economics, UC ranks in the top 100. Your organisation will benefit from the energy, ideas and expertise our young people bring. Our students are motivated too - almost 40% of UC students work part-time during term time.
- To discuss how you can employ UC graduates visit the website of our Careers, Internship and Employment team.