Internship (placement)

Short Description

It is a training method based on learning- by- doing and active participation in a new created environment for training to discover new directions to continue the study outside the traditional academic entities. It is a method for knowledge transfer from- science and Business and NGO sectors and vice versa. In our case it is a knowledge transfer from science to business and NGO sector. It gives skills to collaborate with professionals outside academic community and to be a member of a complex multidisciplinary team.

The steps of the method are:
1. Preparatory stage: Discover a company for placement of each group member. A study is carried out to select companies in which PhD student to join a complex study team and to work on a company issue. For each member of the target group there is a mentor pointed by the company who is responsible to involve the student in the investigated topic and to acquaint with the needs of the company, to introduce him/her to the company people.

2. Implementation stage- Create a program for collaborative work between specialists in the company and young scientists: 35 young scientists and PhD students work for 8-10 months in the selected companies (17 selected companies) and become members of the research teams working on tasks that has to be solved and to produce a product or a service ready for the market.

3. Monitoring stage: periodically meetings with project experts and mentors are carried out to inform each other about the processing of the internship, what they evaluate as positive and negative, what kind of difficulties they have and other issues concerning the effective collaboration between students and team of the company. 4. Evaluation stage: Evaluation was based on: Questionnaire for self-satisfaction of the group members of their internship; Observation of the mentors of the company; Results achieved during the internship.

Pedagogical Information

It is a method training to unify the professional language, to upgrade skills for team working for innovation, to enlarge the potential usage of scientific results and how to transfer the scientific knowledge into a product ready for the market.

Applied in projects

Increasing skills and qualification of young scientists for professional realization in the border areas between science and business, under Operational Program for Development of HR

The project aims are to create a mechanism to facilitate career development of young scientists and post-doctoral students by increasing their transferable skills and skills for communication with their colleagues from other scientific areas in Bulgaria and UK and to create their common language, to teach them to communicate with potential users of the research results. The project idea is to find out effective mechanisms for collaboration between scientists and potential users of their scientific results; to train students to work in a complex team for creating different types of innovations.