13 students from French engineering schools completed a scientific/practical internship at the NSU Information Technologies Department (ITD).
In addition to their internships, students had the opportunity to get acquainted with Novosibirsk, and visit neighboring cities and the Altai Region. The focus of the internship was for students to integrate as much as possible into an unfamiliar environment in another country
Alexei Romanenko, ITD Deputy Dean for International Relations described the program, "This year we hosted students from EISTI, Polytech Paris-Sud, and INSA (Toulouse). Many of the students come on the recommendation of their senior colleagues who already had internships at NSU, and participated in the implementation of IT projects. Given the mystique of Russia and Siberia for Europeans, Akademgorodok is a good choice."
As part of their practical experience, the French students took part in several large projects that were implemented with support from NSU. One of the projects was devoted to the creation of a portal for the analysis of French associative forms. A second was related to the development of mathematical models for predicting various tsunami wave parameters in real time.
Romanenko provided more details about the tsunami project, "Eventually, this will help government decide quickly whether to evacuate the population and protect the infrastructure. These algorithms have already been tested on synthetic data but they need to be tested on real data to prove that they work. This year students were involved in the finalization of the program for filtering the tidal component of the tsunami wave and verifying the program's operation on real data."
Michelle Debrenne, Director of the French Center and coordinator of exchange programs with France, noted that the popularity of short-term internships with the ITD has increased dramatically this year - the number of applications was almost doubled the number of available places. Debrenne emphasized, "This year, 25 applications were submitted so it was necessary to choose participants and the criteria included knowledge of English."
Students were awarded certificates when they completed their internships and they had an informal meeting with the Dean of the ITD Mikhail Lavrentiev, Michel Debrenne and Alexei Romanenko. "Informal conversations are very important. As a result of this meeting, for example, I decided to make a special online questionnaire for the French participants this year so I can prepare a phrase book for French interns,"said Debrenne.
The students are still thinking about their professional futures, but most of them are agree that it would be beneficial to come back to Akademgorodok. Bonn Alexis, a graduate school student in Computer Science and Mathematics Engineering reflected on his time at NSU, "I have very warm memories of this place. I really had a great time. It would be great to return here, although I do not know when that will be possible. I will strongly recommend to my friends that they come to Akademgorodok. And through their memories and photos I will imagine that I was here again."
It is worth noting that more than 50 students from France visited NSU this year as part of the "Scientific Internships for Foreign Students" program that is supported by the 5-100 Project. The priority subjects that are available to French students are Geophysics, Mathematics, IT, Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
