RIS Internship Annual Project Meeting held in Wroclaw
This year`s annual consortium meeting was held at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology – WUST (Politechnika Wroclawska) from 7th to 8th September. Altogether 12 partners participated in the meeting, from which 11 were present on-site and 1 online.
On the first day, during the Steering Committee meeting, the project implementation status was presented in terms of an overview of the achieved, in progress and planned project activities including deliverables/outputs and milestones as markers. The main project milestones, such as opening the Call for students, launching the new Matchmaking application and developing the supporting guidelines, were reached in the planned project months to ensure smooth and successful internship implementation throughout the year. Naturally, the project communication, dissemination and recruitment strategies are continuously ongoing as supporting processes, as well as the development and implementation of the exchange strategy to find the right synergy between the EIT Labelled students and our RIS Internship programme. Only 3 months are left to finish the 2nd year of project implementation, and already around 90% of target values for core KPIs were achieved. The internal KPIs distribution was also presented showing the difference between the planned and achieved number of students/supervisors per partner. 7 out of 10 partners showed overperformance in achieving the target number of students. The same results are concerning the target number of supervisors recruited to our programme, only for different partners. The risk mitigation plan was also presented with new risks identified for 2023. The likelihood of all risks affecting the project implementation was decreased to a lower level.
In the scope of project sustainability, a detailed analysis of Questionnaire results– a survey on best practices of internship programmes – was shown. Some of the questionnaire results identified from Industry responses show that 80% of the companies are willing to hire permanently those interns who successfully conduct internships and 66% of the companies already hired between 1 and 10 interns. Questionnaire results from the Universities' point of view, show that even 96% of them manage or participate in an internship programme for master students and in more than 50% of the cases the Quality Assurance system is managed within the institution. A more detailed survey analysis will be presented in the scope of the project sustainability plan by the end of the year.
The overview of students` applications to the RIS Internship programme was presented in the period from February to September 2023. Peaks of applications were correlated with the Matchmaking events dates, and with the number of new organisations applied and internship positions offered in 2023. Created internships were interpreted according to the internship candidates and their country of universities, internship candidates and country of citizenship. In total 82 internships were created from February to September. Most internships were created for Greek (19), Hungarian (17) and Croatian (16) students since students from those universities were most interested in our Programme. A high number of applicants also come from Poland and Italy (more than 20), but only one-third of them managed to create internships with desired organisations. The status of students` applications regarding the country of citizenship shows that this year we had applications from students coming from 44 different countries (RIS and non-RIS included). The total number of organisations in the pool is 96 meaning that the target number for this year has been overachieved according to the project proposal. All organisations in the pool come from 17 different (RIS) countries. Another important attribute is of course the number and distribution of placement positions (open positions for internships) per country of host organisations. Most internship positions are offered from Greece (33), Spain (31) and Croatia (21) since those countries also have the highest number of total organisations in the pool. The number of internships created also corresponds to this fact, only Spain and Greece have the same number of total internships (18), Slovenia comes second place with 12 total internships created and Croatia the third with 11 of them.
In the scope of capacity building the main objectives, goals and general content of the final versions of the student`s and mentor`s guide to successful internship implementation were presented in a detailed manner. The presentation on financial management included an overview of budget spending per category and per partner in the second year of project implementation.
In conclusion, the project implementation status in September is satisfying and going towards achieving the planned Key Performance Indicators to 100%, as well as other project main and specific objectives. The action plan for the rest of the 2023. was presented to all partners, as well as the initial action plan with main activities for 2024.
