Internships and the end of course project

The IPPEX placement : IPPEX (professional immersion in an operational role)

You will undertake an immersion placement in the first year of your program.

This is a placement lasting a minimum of four weeks, which takes place at the end of the academic year (June). The aim is to give you an experience of working life through an operational job in industry, public works, retail,… The purpose of this work experience is to expose you to the business world and the interplay of actors, to give you a taste of managerial organization and its social dimension.

Students are expected to give an oral account of their experience, and produce a short report. The placement can take place abroad, provided that the trainee’s grasp of the country’s language is equivalent to level B2. The immersion placement is worth 3 ECTS.

It is your job to find your own placement, with the support of the School.

Examples of immersion placements: production worker/construction site laborer/maintenance worker/shelf stacker/self-service employee/warehouse worker…

The engineering internship

You are required to complete a company or laboratory internship between the 2nd and 3rd year of your program. Professional experience or initiation to research, depending on your choice of 3rd year option.

Duration: 3 months, June to August

Objectives of the company internship: to learn the job of engineer and acquire professional experience on a real project. You apply your academic knowledge and develop new professional skills over a period of 12 weeks.

Objectives of the laboratory internship: working in a laboratory, you are confronted by the existence of unresolved problems and discover methods to resolve them. You take part in a team’s research work and obtain an introduction to experimental methods, to analysis, to the process of assessing results. You get involved in a specific topic and produce results.

Optional long internship or gap year: this option can replace the company internship. It begins between June and September, and lasts at least 10 months in a single company or in two different structures in France or abroad. This internship gives you the opportunity of performing in the role of a novice engineer and discovering a business sector. This long-term work experience will help you to decide if you have made the right choice and to pursue your career plans.

It is your job to find your own internship, with the support of the School.

► A compulsory session of “professional and educational preparation for the engineering internship” takes place in May, to help you prepare to tackle this work experience and to anticipate the feedback session in early September.

A few sample internships

Examples of short internships

• XELIS: Correlation between models of ground subsidence and subsidence actually measured in excavating an urban subway tunnel.
• HSBC: Summer analyst.
• Ministry of Defense: Analysis of simplified methods relating to the seismic response of a structure in the form of displacement.

Examples of long internships

• Airbus, Toulouse: Optimization of composite lay-up, including the number of layers, the shape of the layers, and the orientation of the fibers.
• Société Générale, New York: Analysis of the US specificities of the Foreign Exchange Market Making activity
• Suez Environnement, Paris: Innovative design of a future wastewater treatment and purification plant.

PFE  End of Course Project (PFE)

End of third year - minimum 17 weeks - February to September

The end of course project (PFE) is the final stage of the program before entering the working world. It takes place within a company or a research establishment. The PFE differs from internships in its academic ambition: the aim is not only to add further professional experience to your CV but to complete an individual piece of work, applying the knowledge acquired during your training and demonstrating qualities of imagination, curiosity and scientific rigor, while at the same time bringing the added value expected by the host organization.

Project director, dissertation, and public defense

The PFE is supervised by a project director, a teacher at the School approved by the Chairman of the relevant faculty department. It concludes with a written dissertation, which must be defended before a panel consisting at least of the department chairman or his/her representative, the project director ,and a scientific adviser representing the host establishment.