Internship
Preparation for the internship
Third-year students attending one of the Professional Track of the Undergraduate Programme in Mechanical Engineering must follow a Preparation path to be awarded 2 ECTS required to get started with your internship experience. The Preparation for the Internship, organised in collaboration with the Career Service, consists of attending four half-day introductory workshops. Beware, you can apply to attend the workshops only after you’ve been awarded at least 100 ECTS. These workshops are organised both during the first and second semester, usually during the course break and before the exam period. It’s highly recommended to attend the workshops the semester before the actual quest for the internship – regardless of where in your timetable the workshops figure in.
The Preparation for the internship is complete after attending four workshops covering topics aiming to inform students on important matters when approaching a new working environment. Each one will get you awarded 0.5 ECTS.
Module 1: “Round Table with Mechanical Engineering Companies”
During the discussion panel, Managers form important companies working in the mechanical industry will share their knowledge on:
- Working positions for mechanical engineers in companies;
- Companies organisational structure;
- Job application: cv and motivational letter.
Module 2: “Ready, Set, Stage!”
During the workshop “Ready, Set, Stage!” you will be given the broad guidelines by attending an Interactive lab session on how to:
- Use internship search tools;
- Select the right internship according to your track;
- Apply, sending your cv and motivational letter.
Module 3: “Group Assessment: Mock Interviews”
The third module is a group assessment, during which a company representative carries out some mock interviews. The goal is to raise awareness among future candidates about the required soft skills to highlight while being interviewed. In other words, during this event you will learn to:
- Recognise all important steps of a job interview;
- Recognise most asked questions;
- Answer your employer’s question adequately;
- Discern all good behaviours to adopt from all bad ones to avoid.
Module 4: Roadmap to Job Hunting Tools
The fourth module is an interactive workshop with different stands where an HR expert provides you with some advice on how to:
- Use job hunting platforms (social, application, companies);
- Write your CV – final draft and proofreading;
- Establish a professional network.
Internship details
As part of your Programme, you must do a compulsory internship. This working experience is your chance to directly apply all analysis and resolution methods learned during your studies and to discover the working environment and all related issues. Moreover, doing an internship is your chance to share your acquired engineering skills on a particular subject, and be part of a team in finding the problem, and proposing a solution. Being included in a company will also allow you to improve your technical skills by confronting them with the company know-how, especially on the shared working case.
You must choose between two different internship programmes, from 400 to 420 hours:
- full-time internship: 3 months, 40 hours per week;
- part-time internship: 4 to 5 months, 20 hours per week.
The internship experience must be continuous, therefore it is not possible to do more internships at different times and make it count as one. All internship regulations are established at a national level and enforced by the regional institutions and the University. The Administration Office of Politecnico di Milano is in charge of preparing all legally binding documents, checking the quality of educational projects, and providing insurance. For further details on your internship, please visit the Career Service website.
All students must pay particular attention when asked to write a technical report on their activities during the internship period. You must write this report during your whole experience and when the internship ends, hand it (within 10 days) to your academic tutor to be awarded the internship ECTS.
At the end of the internship experience, both you and your tutor must fill in an online quality-check survey – link and instructions will be sent via email the day prior to the expiration date of the internship agreement – no later than ten working days after receiving the email. NB. If you’re about to graduate, check the academic calendar on the School website for your deadlines.
To sum up, these are the steps to finalise your internship:
- You and your company tutor fill in the quality-check surveys;
- You hand in your report;
- Your academic tutor awards you the ECTS of your internship;
- You receive a confirmation mail and a .pdf copy of your certificate;
- You see the word “CONV” (Validation) next to the Internship line on your timetable and 00 on your grade column – since it is not included when calculating your GPA.
Here some useful documents you can download (available only in Italian):