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Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: May 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

ESPCI is a French Engineering School as well as a research center benefiting from a scientific heritage of excellence. ESPCI hosted indeed six Nobel Prize winners. Our school proposes an original and interdisciplinary four-year curriculum. The two first years are composed by a core syllabus teaching as much chemistry than physics. It is in their third and fourth year that our students chose their specialisation in Physics, chemistry, physico-chemistry or biology. Furthermore, our particular teaching methods are focusing on fundamental sciences and experimentation. We propose as much theoretical lessons than lab sessions. Research at ESPCI is worldwide renown and we regularly welcome foreign scientists. Our international industrial partners appreciate particularly our research as well as our students' education. By creating an international office, ESPCI clearly targets new international goals. Presently, 70 % of our students have an international experience mostly due to industrial internships, more rarely to research internships. Besides, concerning incoming mobility, we would like to welcome more foreign students in our first and second cycles, more precisely in our engineering and master courses. The Erasmus+ program offers tools enabling ESPCI to realise our goals, this is the reason why we are promoting Erasmus+, unexploited up to now. Concerning outgoing mobility, our students are largely applying to Erasmus+ grants to finance their industrial internships unlike laboratory internships, which are most of the time signed with French laboratories. Some rare students are able to afford internships in America or in Asia. ESPCI would like to balance the opportunity and give all the students the possibility to have a lab internship outside France and inside Europe. Our target is to increase of 20% the number of students having an internship in Europe. Erasmus+ really boosts the number of students able to work in a European laboratory as we registered in 2015 five French students benefiting from Erasmus+ for their internship in laboratories and in 2016, ten students. Concerning incoming mobility, bilateral agreements signed with our European partners allowed us to welcome more European students and particularly in our masters. The number of foreign students applications to our masters increased by 20%. In addition, Erasmus+ allowed us to consolidate and intensify academic collaborations with some particular partners as for example Politechnika Warszawska doubling the number of students exchanged. Furthermore, we developed a new master in microfluidics based on a partnership with DTU Denmark. In 2016, we launched several partnerships with European institutions, as for example Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna or CTU Prague. From now on, we have to capitalize on these partnerships to promote a particular mobility clearly identified to increase incoming and outgoing mobility. Moreover, it is important to us to sign new agreements in order to diversify our didactic exchanges with universities presenting strong research links with us, which is for instance the case of TUM, Leuven, Aachen and a lot of other European universities In addition, we observe that our students are not yet accustomed to use the Erasmus+ programs. This is the reason why we focused on a strong communication campaign presenting Erasmus+ to students. We developed flyers and dedicated a web page to our European collaborations in terms of internships or exchange years. Lastly, we have now to intensify our efforts toward faculties in order to promote the mobility of the teachers and researchers implied in the development of bilateral agreements with partner universities.

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