Internship

The academic year ends with a end-of-study internship (stage de fin d’étude or SFE). This internship marks the completion of your engineering studies and is particularly important. It is an opportunity to apply not only the technical knowledge and skills you have acquired, but also the interpersonal skills (integration, autonomy, communication, ethics, leadership, etc.) that you have developed throughout your studies. This is why the end-of-study internship accounts for a quarter of your annual credits (15 ECTS out of 60) and also why it is subject to strict launch, monitoring, and evaluation procedures that are detailed in this official document published by the academic department.

Please read this document carefully, in particular to know what the school expects throughout the internship (preliminary report, mid-internship meeting, skills assessment, report and defense, etc.).

In addition to this document, you will find below specific instructions and precisions that must be followed at the various stages.

Looking for an internship

When looking for your internship, keep in mind it must satisfy several strict requirements, in particular:

  • The objectives of the internship must be sufficiently ambitious and complex to be recognized as being at the engineer/master level, particularly from a technical and/or scientific perspective.
  • The intership duration must be at least 23 working weeks (i.e. holidays not included).
  • The internship cannot start earlier than the official end of the academic year, at the end of April.
  • For legal reasons, an internship agreement (convention de stage), whether issued by CentraleSupélec or by the company, cannot exceed 6 months and cannot extend beyond December (i.e. it cannot extend beyond the calendar year following your final academic year). If, for any reason, your internship cannot be completed before December 31, at least the portion that extends into the following year must be covered by a standard employment contract, either for a fixed term (CDD) or indefinite term (CDI).
  • If an internship cannot be defended and validated before end of February, you will have to re-enroll at CentraleSupélec for the ongoing year, under the “3A suite” option (enrollment fees reduced by half).

All these requirements must be met for the internship to be validated by the school (see the validation stage below for details).

Having your internship proposal approved by us

Once you have found an internship, whatever the type of contract (convention de stage, CDD, CDI, etc), you have to proceed a multi-step validation procedure:

  1. First you must fill out a form on EDUNAO. For this go to the EDUNAO course entitled Projet MDS SDI - MTZ - CS (20XX-20YY) of your year. Then fill the form available in the section Description de stage. You will be asked to provide a title, a description, the company and location, the start and end dates, the details of your administrative contact, and of your internship technical supervisor.
    It is essential to provide a specific title and subject (no generic or vague titles such as “data scientist”, “trader”, etc.). Based on this information, we will be able to assess whether the internship is at a sufficient engineering level, and whether we can approve it. This verification is carried out in your interest to limit the risk of the internship not being ultimately validated due to insufficient results. If we feel that the title and description are not clear enough, we may reject the internship application until your description is compliant.

  2. Only once you have completed the previous step, make an official request on monstage.centralesupelec.fr as described in the official document and explained in the message you should have received from Didier Duval, internship coordinator.
    Any request will be refused by us until the EDUNAO form (step 1) has been correctly completed.
    Important: depending on the position of your name in the alphabetical ranking, when applying on monstage you will need to specify a different name for the “responsable mention” AND the “référent mention”.

    For the academic year 2025-2026:

    • If the first letter of your last name is between A and G included, declare Joël Legrand both as “responsable de mention” et “enseignant référent”.
    • Otherwise, declare Frédéric Pennerath both as “responsable de mention” et “enseignant référent”.

Meet expectations and deliverables during the internship

At the beginning of your internship, you will receive a message telling you who is your academic advisor for SDI-M (called référent mention), in addition to your academic advisor for the “filière” (called référent filière), if you have followed one.

These academic advisors are CentraleSupélec teachers, who will be your main points of contact throughout the internship. You must contact both of them to report any problems that may arise during the internship. In particular, if you notice that your work moves substantially away from the subject initially proposed by the company, you must immediately notify your internship supervisors.

You must also send them all expected deliverables:

  • A preliminary short report one month after the beginning of the internship.
  • A mid-internship point meeting, during which is studied your self-assessment of competences (based on the following grid).
  • A final internship report, to send at least one week before the defense.
  • A final internship defense, with an oral presentation in presence of your academic referents and your company supervisor.

All details about the expected contents of all deliverables are provided in the document.