I (Thorsten A. Kern) receive on a weekly basis at least two, sometimes four to five wishes to supervise a thesis or external work in industry. Basically I am open to do so. However, there are some rules and criteria which I use to make my decision:

1.) There must be a strategic interest with the company and ideally already an established partnership on a professional basis.

2.) The relationship in the 3-way-collaboration has to match, we have to get to know the student and the company's supervisor.

3.) We need to have capacity for the supervision. When we do supervision, we will involve ourselves significantly in the methodological and content-related work and processes. We will never do the supervision pro-forma only. For both, Bachelor- and Master-thesis, supervisions are limited in capacity with one external thesis per scientific staff member at a maximum.

4.) The topic must match to our research (and not only to the title of my Institute). You can put almost every engineering topic unter the umbrella of "mechatronics", so make sure to match our running research with your request!

5.) Especially in case of a master thesis a significant academic level and a real scientific challenge must exist in the task. This scientific challenge may even go beyond the interests of the external partner, and may be considered inefficient from the perspective of a company. But it is a requirement, as we do not grade that you can do "this specific topic", but we grade that you have the skills to do topics of almost any kind in a certain domain with a certain complexity. And this skillset you will demonstrate with one topic.

6.) If there is a financial compensation by the company it must be not more than a small allowance for the effort. It must not have the level of a salary, this is not acceptable! The equality between students doing the thesis at the University and at an external company must be maintained. The only exception to this rule are students under the rules of a dual-studies.

If you feel that your specific case matches above criteria I am happy about getting in contact!

Furthermore I recommend to start organizing a supervision of an external thesis 8 to 12 weeks before start. We at our institute are almost always fully loaded with external supervisions. Spontaneously there is almost no chance that we can handle "just one more".