Speed Dating: Picking up your Internship in 30 minutes

From May 9 to 11 the 12th edition of “Speed Dating for Internships” at EPITA took place. Back on this special time of meetings between students and businesses with Laurent Trébulle, director of Career Services on campus.

For this 12th edition, 45 companies participated in a Speed Dating Event at EPITA.

What is it?

Like Speed Dating for romantic purposes, I created this concept to promote fast meetings between our students and businesses so they can see if they have an affinity and a desire to go further. It is also a way for us to remind companies that the students are on track in their search for their 4th year internship, which begins in September for five months, and then encourages them to offer their positions now. 80% of companies are returning participants, some continuously since the first event back in 2000 such as Bouygues Telecom.

How are these meetings?

Companies have 30 minutes to introduce themselves, their professional environment and what they expect from students who would join them. Following the presentation, the company shall be in another room and privately meet students who were interested in the presentation to answer questions, assess candidates and collect resumes.

What are these companies?

Many sectors are represented: internet players (Meetic Sale-Private), digital communication agencies (Digitas, Fullsix or Wunderman), game publishers (Ubisoft, Eugen System or Kobojo), professional software publishers (Murex or Teradata), new media actors (Backelite – mobile application development or Ysance – Facebook application development), great names of the banking industry (BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole) , media (TF1 or Eurosport) or manufacturers (Thales, Safran, MBDA). And do not forget the startups, often created by Alumni from EPITA (Jump Computing, Astase, Aerys, Hexaglobe, etc..) Who are recruiting interns from profiles they know well.

How many concrete internship offers will be made?

On average companies have three or four positions each to offer, which makes more than 130 options offered over three days. A few hundred will be provided through this event. We’re at the 12th edition and is a format that works well.

Students cannot attend the 45 presentations, how do they make their choices?

We ask each student to attend a minimum of six presentations on criteria they choose from highly individual career plans (corporate reputation, word of mouth from former students, etc..) For example, one who wants to work in the video game industry absolutely must do at least one of his internship in the field for references once on the job market as as full time Engineer.

We also consider that these meetings allow students to better understand the market, the areas in which companies work, and the technologies most widely used. Finally, next week, students will receive a booklet with all the offers made available this week. If they missed a presentation, they may still apply.

This event is a specificity of EPITA?

Yes. In general, schools are very active for graduation courses (often pre-recruitment in the IT sector) with forums dedicated or days, but their offers are poorer for intermediate internships built in the curriculum. Here we really innovated both in the original format and the target ofpopulation in their 4th year of their 5-year program. In addition, we conducted 130 CV workshops (in French or English) last week to allow our Engineering Students to be successful in their research.