Aston Business Clinic for Students

Aston Business Clinic provides you with great opportunities to work with a team of peers and create solutions to real-world problems.

These business challenges are provided by businesses that have real-life projects to work on, and who want to tap into your creativity and research skills in order to find potential solutions.

What do you get out of it?

Engaging in an Aston Business Clinic project gives you access to a range of highly beneficial opportunities, including:

• The chance to work with a range of businesses, test your developing skills and knowledge, and even put yourself on their radar for future employment.
• Incredible experiences that will enhance your CV and give you more opportunities to stand out from your competitors.
• Free learning through the training sessions that you attend, which will help to prepare and support you for the project work you will be doing.
• The development of essential skills relating to teamwork, communication, presentation skills and many more.

What do the business get out of it?

Aston University has a rich history of business engagement because the business community recognises the quality and calibre of the work that our students and staff do. Working with the Aston Business Clinic means they get:

• The chance to support the growth and development of emerging, work-ready professionals.
• The opportunity to benefit from new ideas and creative solutions to their real-world problems.
• The chance to contribute to the direction and focus of Aston Business Clinic work.

What do we expect from you?

The work you will do in the Aston Business Clinic is connected with real challenges for businesses and therefore it’s not a simulation. Our expectation is that you will engage professionally with the business community and the staff team supporting your experience. We also expect you to learn and have fun in the process.

What should you expect from the Aston Business Clinic?

In order to support your learning and experience, you'll need to attend five training sessions that will help to prepare you for working as part of a team to address a real-world business challenge.

These sessions will be between 1 and 2 hours long and will take place during lunch periods and after hours. In addition, you'll need to attend a team coaching session once a week for an hour throughout the process.

The content of the training sessions will be based on the following:

• The psychology of teams – how do high-performing teams function?
• The impact of behaviours on productivity – avoiding conflict in the workplace
• Working with clients – how do you get to what they really want?
• Pitching for impact – the 5 E's of effective presentations
• Design thinking – human-centred techniques to solve problems creatively

Hear from our students

Hina Aziz, Graduate with BSc (Hons) in Politics & Economics

“The last eight weeks have been a huge learning rollercoaster with the Aston Business Clinic. Not only have I worked on two extremely interesting projects for MSDUK and Behaviour Hackers but I have also learnt new things about myself.

My time with the Clinic has been so valuable and I would like to share my appreciation to Dr Elinor Vettraino, Ibrahim Abbas, Elsa Zenatti-Daniels, Iwan Griffiths, and Aimee Postle for allowing me to be a part of this process.

I am so gutted that the internship is now over. However, not all great things come to an end. I am so excited to share that MSDUK has invited my team (Michelle Williams, Chris Dimmock, Obieze Amukamara) and me to present our solutions to their Marketing team and to work on the social media campaign for their Innovation Summit 2020.”

If you want to engage with Aston Business Clinic, please email businessclinic@aston.ac.uk.