In all years, our students work on a "Personal Development Project".

To further develop leadership skills, students work on their personal development project (PDP): an individual community-oriented project which each student will undertake across the four years of their PhD programme. In the PDP the student will take the lead in developing and promoting a resource (e.g. shared software or dataset) or an activity (e.g. scientific workshop or group public engagement event) of benefit to the broader SLT research community.

In Year 1 each student will choose a small project that is close to their interest, but distinct from the PhD project. This may be an outreach project, e.g. teaching AI in schools, an open source project, or a data collection project in an under-resourced domain. Students produce a plan covering the whole project period, which includes finding partners to work with and obtaining small amounts of funding if necessary.

In Years 2-4 each student continues to work on their Personal Development Project, refining their original project plan as necessary, until they have achieved their objective.