The FIND CDT student journey at starts at the interview stage when you will be assigned to a project topic that matches your interests and career aspirations. You will embark on your research project from the outset and maintain continuous contact with your academic and/or industrial supervisors throughout your degree programme.

The taught programme of technical units and transferable skills workshops runs alongside the research project during the first three years.

All courses are mandatory. The technical units are credit-bearing and you need to pass all of them to qualify for the final award of your degree.  

Technical Units

This combination of courses has been designed to develop your technical knowledge and underpinning skills, to equip you for success in your future engineering career.

The technical training begins with a residential course on the industrial context of NDE, and will include lectures, workshops, hands-on NDE activities, industrial visits and networking opportunities. 

Residential courses are delivered by world-leading expert academics across all the universities in the partnership. You will have the opportunity to visit labds and specialist facilities and to work togather and socialise with your fellow students.

The FIND CDT will cover your travel and subsistence costs to attend residential courses.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The programme will be delivered through a collaboration between our industrial partners and the highly qualified team from the Bristol Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This training will take a predominately practice-orientated educational approach based on collaborative team-work across disciplines and cultures and built around the central themes of technology transfer, entre/intrapreneurship and responsible innovation. 

Responsible Innovation

Through a series of workshops and lectures interspaced throughout your doctorate students will explore the fundamentals of Responsible Innovation: what it is, why it matters, how we might begin conversations with non-scientists about the issues at stake, and how their concerns might be relevant yet different from our own.

Students will consolidate this learning and look forward, to your research projects and the futures your research might co-create and exist within. You will have the opportunity to explore the ways in which values are expressed in research and innovation, the potential social, ethical, environmental and political entanglements of your research and what you might do to address them.

Transferable Skills Courses

  • Project Management
  • Communication Skills Training
  • Career Workshop
  • Public Engagement
  • Science Entrepreneurship

These workshops are delivered by a range of expert and experienced course leaders via a mixture of online and in-person formats. Some are included in residential weeks, other are standalone via Teams or Zoom.

A wide range of personal and professional development courses is also available to all our students via the Bristol Doctoral College.

Final Year

Year 4 of your research degree will focus on completing your  project and writing up your thesis. Our graduates have an excellent track record of completing on time and progressing into industrial roles.

38 of 40 doctoral graduates are now working in industry, nearly all related to NDE, and several are already in senior roles.