A puzzling trend in French engineer school students is to contest the role of companies in their training or even the very training towards an engineering job, as illustrated by the above Le Monde article of last weekend. A former Polytechnique student has even published a book entitled Désertons, calling for deserting the job market. (Paradoxically on sale on Amazon!) These schools are indeed a French peculiarity in that they were initially created to train civil servants for the French State and later expanded to larger cohorts free to join public or private companies. They are radically distinct (and independent) from universities, in their entry mechanism (with a specific competition exam, requiring its own specific preparation public programme), in their training, and in their funding (three times higher per student and mostly issued from other ministries than the Ministry of Education, with minute fees if any). The State support extend to paying a salary to Polytechnique students during their studies, which should on principle be reimbursed when the students do not join a civil service or a public company although it is unclear if anyone has yet been asked to since 2000. (Not due to the 2000 bug!) I thus fail to get the logic of this contestation when the professional purpose of these schools is clear to everyone, when there exist alternatives in the (public) university system, and when the French State is supporting much more intensively this branch of the education system…
Archive for sponsorship
le beurre et l’argent du beurre (have your cake and eat it too)[nicht den Fünfer und das Weggli]
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags École Polytechnique, beurre, bug, cake, Centrale Supélec, classes préparatoires, Engineering, ENSAE, enterprises, French education ministry, French politics, grandes écoles, have your cake and eat it too, Le Monde, Mines de Paris, sponsorship, Telecom ParisTech on October 21, 2025 by xi'anMCMSki IV, Jan. 6-8, 2014, Chamonix (news #1)
Posted in Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags adap'skiii, Alps, BayesComp, Chamonix, France, IMS, ISBA, ISBA conference, MCMC, MCMSki, Mont Blanc, Montenvers, ski, sponsorship on September 22, 2012 by xi'an
As advertised on the ‘Og, the ISBA mailing list and now the birth certificate of BayesComp (!), MCMSki IV is taking place for sure in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, January 6-8 2014. The webpage has been started, thanks to Merrill Liechty, and should grow with informations about the location, the hotels, registration, transportation, and of course skiing (check here for an interactive entry to the whole domain)…. Contributions to the webpage are most welcome!
Now that the scientific committee has been gathered, we are discussing about the format of the meeting, the scope being chosen as covering the whole range of MCMC theory, methodology and practice, i.e., a merge of Adap’ski and the former MCMSki. We are most certainly going to soon make a call for contributed talks, either at the individual or session level. So get prepared with your abstract(s) and list(s) of speaker(s)!
The conference will end on the 8th of January with a banquet at the historical Hotel du Montenvers, over the Mer de Glace glacier, getting there by the equally historical Montenvers rack railway we have booked for this occasion (as it does not usually run in Winter and definitely not that late). Later update: after discussions within the organisation committee we decided to have a lower key banquet within the town of Chamonix at La Calèche…
A
nd I just got the news from the IMS that the meeting is now officially co-sponsored by the IMS! As well as the ISBA BayesComp section, of course!
