Student-Initiated pathway

If you are unfamiliar with the StudentShapers scheme as a whole, it is designed to foster staff-student partnership projects, which enhance educational provision and make positive change to the student experience.  Students are funded for their time engaged on these projects, but all other project-related costs must be met by the department.  Your proposal may well require materials or resources, which is why departmental buy-in is so essential via your chosen staff partner.   

 To be eligible for StudentShapers scheme, a project needs to be: 

• Partnered with a staff member and have authentic partnership in mind which allows equal contribution and use of experience and skill-sets 
• Enhancing educational provision or student experience at Imperial.   

Please look under ‘Assessment Criteria for Proposals’ on the ‘How to Get Involved’ page for detailed criteria.   

StudentShapers has supported a diverse range of projects (evidenced on the Stories of Partnership page) from small-scale, lab-based, or module-specific development, to cross-faculty initiatives on assessment and feedback.  

The final proposal must be submitted by a staff member to ensure the project has actionable outputs. To make sure that your ideas have departmental buy-in and are in line with existing strategies being rolled out across the university, students initiating a project must approach appropriate staff members in advance of proposal submission, and work on the proposal together as co-applicants.    

Your expertise in your discipline and project idea makes you, in the first instance, the most appropriate person to identify which staff member would be a suitable partner. However, as has always been StudentShapers policy, if a student struggles to find an appropriate partner for their proposal idea, they can contact the StudentShapers team who will try to support them where possible.   

Please note that submission via a staff email address is required for the proposal to be considered; this is also to ensure that the staff member takes responsibility for the final check of the proposal and is giving their full commitment to the partnership and the project. 

You can submit in one of two formats: 

• As a one-on-one partnership with one staff member, and one student.  This format will work best if you have a pre-existing working relationship with the staff member and are working on a more small-scale, curriculum-focused or module-specific project idea.  For example, 'Interactive curriculum-aligned web application for interpreting diagnostics’ project.

• As a team of maximum four students with a staff partner.  This format would be the appropriate for larger scale or more ambitious projects that require multiple areas of expertise, or where you feel multiple perspectives will be valuable.  You will be asked in your proposal to outline and justify how your student team has come together and how you will ensure equal partnership and buy-in across the team.  For example, ‘Team Misophonia’ project.

Please note that demonstrating a strong understanding of the benefit of staff-student partnership will strengthen your proposal; this pathway is intended to support authentic collaboration, with students’ ideas being cultivated in the proposal development process with a staff partner.  The sooner you can identify a staff partner, the sooner they will be able to support you in developing your proposal. 

The ‘Student-Initiated’ projects pathway has been approved on a pilot one-cycle basis for the 2025/26 academic year.   

The proposal deadline is 8th February 2026, for projects that intend to take place during summer break of 2026, in a full-time capacity (equivalent to a 9am-5pm working day).  Dependent on the scale and desired outputs of your proposal, the timeframes of your project could be between two and eight weeks in length, as agreed by members of the project team.   

Please see the existing ‘Click to Submit a Student-Initiated pathway Project proposal’ button above, when you and your staff partner are ready to submit.   

We’re sure you have a lot of questions and we’re keen to help you get started.  In the first instance, please use the StudentShapers Application Guide Explorer (SAGE) chatbot for your initial questions.  If you’re still unable to find the information you need, please contact us at studentshapers@imperial.ac.uk and we will be happy to help.