Newsletter n°5 - ParisTech student exchanges and dual degree programmes – all you need to know

INTERVIEW : Gilles Trystram, General Director of AgroParisTech and President of the Teaching Commission

For over ten years, the ParisTech schools have been providing their students with the opportunity to benefit from the wealth of disciplines on offer across the network by undertaking various types of academic exchange, for example a specialisation year in a different school, or a dual degree programme.

How do the ParisTech student exchanges work?

In 2008, at the request of students, the schools decided to implement an exchange system to allow their students to acquire new skills in an environment related to, yet different from, that of their own school.

The ParisTech schools therefore signed a convention governing several types of exchange:

• Final year: Students can opt to take the final year of their engineering degree in one of the other schools.
• Repeat year: Students who are required to repeat a year can do so in a different school.
• Substitution: Students can replace some of their course modules with modules of equivalent credit offered by other schools.
• Doctoral degrees: As part of the additional modules required for their thesis, doctoral students can take classes, teaching units or seminars of equivalent credit in one or more of the other schools.

Exchanges are subject to the approval of the student’s home school, which ensures that the requested exchange will be of academic value to the student.

Could you tell us a bit more about the dual degree programmes?

As well as the exchange system, students can also choose to do a dual degree, which means taking two years in one of the ParisTech schools, followed by two years in a different school.

We have also been running master’s exchange programmes for several years, and of course there are the ATHENS exchanges too. The latter only run for a week, but every year over 2,000 ParisTech students choose to complete an ATHENS class in another ParisTech school or at one of our partner universities in Europe.

How many students choose to do an exchange?

Over the past five years, around 100 students have completed an exchange programme: 25 engineers, 50 engineers on dual degree programmes, plus master’s students and doctoral students. The Teaching Commission is currently looking into drafting a new exchange convention, in particular to address the issue of tuition fees.

What is special about these programmes?

Each exchange is oriented around the specific ambitions of the student and their desire to enrich their course of study. Each 3^rd year specialisation is flexible, so students have a wide variety of options to choose from.

The ParisTech schools are used to working together, which makes it easy to arrange exchanges and provide our students with one-to-one support.

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Read the testimony : Léon Hong

Diplômé en 2011 des Arts et Métiers, Léon Hong a été l’un des premiers élèves à bénéficier d’un échange ParisTech en effectuant sa dernière année de cycle ingénieur à l’Ecole des Ponts ParisTech.