SfES Project

Course manual 2025/2026

Course content

SfES project is a compulsory project for SfES physics students. Student decide when to start and finish, but cannot take longer than a 6EC course in total.  A short research based project is executed within or outside academia, targeting sustainability research. Research may be literature research, resulting in a literature thesis, or desktop or experimental research resulting in data, data analyses or other output of relevance to supervising researchers and organizations.  The project results in a report briefly describing the topic, the main question, the answer or result and a discussion and conclusion. Additional data and information can be placed in appendices. 

A project outside an academic laboratory is much encouraged, researching energy and sustainability issues for a company, municipality, green office, and others. In such case, the research and report will be conducted and written in the style of the course Current Sustainable Energy Technologies (P3).

Within the university, a literature research and research project can be adjacent to, but must be sufficiently different from, the master internship research project/s. It is advised to conduct the SfES project before your master research internship.

After enrolling in the course, the project starts with contacting the coordinator with a brief overview of plan, the output that will be generated, grading scheme from examiner. The examiner generally is a staff member from the physics or chemistry depts of VU or UvA. In case such examiner cannot be found, the course coordinator can advise on other examiners.

Objectives

• Student demonstrates the ability to perform and  or describe state of the art physics research in renewable energy or sustainability.
• Or, student demonstrates the applicability of sfes-physics courses such as current sustainable energy technologies in organizations or companies outside academia.

Learning activities

Attendance

Assessment

Assessment is conform assessments of a research internship. Given the brief period of research, examinators must send their grading policy, explaining what constitutes a particular grade for this particular investigation. This also holds for a literature thesis. Supervisors/examinators send the coordinator of this course a brief description of work including title, the grading policy for this particular type of investigation explaining  insufficient, sufficient, 7, 8, 9 or 10 mark.

Fraud and plagiarism

The 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' applies to this course. This will be monitored carefully. Upon suspicion of fraud or plagiarism the Examinations Board of the programme will be informed. For the 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' see: www.student.uva.nl

Course structure

Contact information

Coordinator

• Raoul Frese