Finding an Internship During the School Year
It is AUP's prerogative to teach its students how internships work in Paris and what French companies look for in students. When a student finds an internship, they have to sign a contract called "convention de stage". This contract is an agreement between the university, the student and the company on what the internship is about, and the duration and remuneration of the internship. Generally, an internship lasts between four to six months at full time and has little room for negotiations or major changes. However, going to AUP as a student who could only work part-time starting in September, this is not the answer I heard from AUP staff and students. I was told there is always room for some negotiations with companies which clearly is not reciprocal with what companies told me.
Part-time internships in Paris
Last summer I went to see the internship office at AUP to get help finding an internship that would go from June to September or October. As a current student, I need to switch to part-time at the beginning of the semester. I wondered if I could still find an internship with these restrictions in Paris and still get a good offer. The internship office told me yes, it was a possibility, and that many students have done internships where they were part-time students and part-time interns.
Throughout May I applied to every possible enterprise in Paris that offered a marketing internship, and I got either no answers or strict refusals.
One day I got a call from the marketing director of a famous French sport company. She liked my profile and the studies I've completed, but had an issue with my schedule. She told me that it was impossible to take someone as an intern for only a few hours every day for two full months, even though I had the ability to do full-time during the summer months. Her team would never have the time to both teach me and get things done. In the end she said that the only possible job she could offer would be working the photocopy machine.
By mid-June, I was desperate for an answer and I decided to email career services again. I told them that I had received no positive answers after contacting multiple companies, and asked about the types of internships that students worked part-time. They said, "It’s really not possible for me to give you a simple answer to that question. Students find all manner of part-time internship positions. It’s just that it often requires a lot of applications and negotiation."
Clearly, there seemed to be a problem. I decided to abandon the research. I knew it would be almost impossible for me to find a part-time internship.
To get an idea of why this was the case, I talked to a French employee at a company who recruits interns in his domain.
In France, interns need to be fully involved in the company and at full time in order to learn the maximum amount
Image Credit: Icons8team/Unsplash
Nicolas Deleplace, engineer of studies and development at Sopra Steria, answered several questions about the process of recruiting interns at his company.
Mr. Deleplace said that he generally rejects requests for part-time internships. He explained that it is because his team generally works on big projects and they prefer only hire students full-time for six months. His company only occasionally hires people for less than six months. There is no room for negotiations because being part-time would simply not allow an an intern to learn everything they need to get the most out of the internship. It would also be time to waste for the team. They also prefer taking senior-level students, as they can be fully implicated in their internship and included in the team.
Many other companies had the same speech as Nicolas Deleplace. A company is generally not going to offer a part-time internship because students will not have enough time to work with employees and have an appropriate learning experience. The student would have to be doing an alternate if he or she wants to be able to work half time which is not the same rhythm style as an internship.
