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It has now been six months since I officially finished my Engineering school, 🏫 I just received my diploma of Engineering.

After my HighSchool, not knowing exactly what I should do to become like my heros: famous entrepreneurs and researchers, I set out to pass a “concours“ in order to enter a list of french engineering school that accepts students just after they finish highschool and integrate a preparatory school.

The french system of Grandes Écoles is complex and quite specific to France, 🇫🇷 : The best french students would enter a preparatory school at the end of their secondary education (which is often still within a highschool) and work for 2 to 3 years to prepare for the “concour” to integrate French Grandes Ecoles. Each School only has a couple hundreds places per yer and tens of thousands of students enter an intellectual fight to integrate the best schools and be immediately rewarded with a bright future.

However great, 👍 and exciting this might seem. It is also frightening and often leads to psychological despair, 😩 and a selection of a certain type of student, 👩‍🎓 . Knowing this type of environment might not be for me and not willing to take any risks I decided to pass a first “concour” before and managed to get the best school in it: ECE paris.

Proud of my achievement I entered this school and its preparatory school, knowing that I only had to pass my exams to get a degree.

A lot then is similar to what exists in other British schooling systems countries. We may work more with an avg. of 35h of class per week but we have also loads of events, funs etc…

A French Diploma of Engineering is similar to getting both an M.Sc., M.eng and B.Sc. at the same time and in a more diverse set of disciplines than what is available in other British schooling systems. However students are not well prepared for academia and do not have deep specific knowledge in a define subject.

In ECE students had to choose a Major and a Minor in their 4th year, to do 2 international exchanges and 4 internships, to be able to graduate.

I thus went to Mexico, 🇲🇽 , England, did internships in Bouygues Construction, HighLife Med, the Flatiron Institute and the University of Kent (you can know more here). I choose to major in Biomedical Engineering and choose Research Engineer as a minor.

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