“Missions Professionnelles”: creating a project
A system that promotes student initiatives
The “Missions Professionnelles” (professional engagement) programme was created to acknowledge students’ engagement. It is specific to the University of Strasbourg, and set up by the IDIP (Institute for Educational Development and Innovation). Since the 2017/2018 school year, it has already enabled many students in Arts, Literature, Languages or Human and Social Sciences to engage themselves in a project that will help them to become more professional as soon as possible. In teams of 3 to 5, they will be supervised by a professional tutor as well as a faculty tutor. This way, students will thrive in a concrete and enriching experience.
This commitment then benefits the students in one of the following ways, according to their choice:
- The student receives a mark as part of the Teaching Unit “d’ouverture” as part of his “Mission Professionelle” (3 ECTS)
- The student obtains – or not – a mark as part of an “Additional” course (3ECTS)
- The student receives an out-of-course validation, in the form of a detailed certificate of participation in the project, issued by the IDIP.
From the call for projects to the project’s execution
A student may choose to respond to a need, expressed by a contractor to the IDIP. The “Missionpro” website lists all the project proposals currently available, and details the profiles and skills required for each one. Once the student has expressed his request, the IDIP coordinator for the “Missions Professionnelles” informs him of his possible admission in the team she is assembling.
There is another way to engage himself. As a student, you can submit a project when a contractor asked you to. Students can thus engage within a university framework, as it is the case for the Focus-LEA programme. Aiming at professionalising and encouraging student involvement, Focus-LEA includes, among other things, projects that are recognized by the IDIP as “Missions Professionnelles”.
In order to do this, the project coordinator will have to submit to the IDIP a brief bill of specifications, listing the objectives of the project and the missions of the team members. The IDIP then validates the project, and each student completes an internship agreement on the advice of their faculty tutor. Before the official launch of the project, the team will have to be trained in project management with the module “3-5 From the team to the project”, available on the moodle plateform. More information on project management is available here.
Evaluation criteria
In order for their project to be validated within the “Missions Professionnelles” framework, a team will have to carry out the following tasks:
- Validate the project management module available on Moodle
- Individually certify 40 to 100 hours of work within the project
- Write a 15-page collective report outlining the progress of the project, an analysis of the challenges encountered and the strategy used to overcome them. It will also include a collective and an individual assessment of the experience
- Present the project to a jury
