The Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) Career Centre opened on November 2008 with the financial support of Globul. It is designed to be an effective mediator between academia and business, to assist the realization and the successful career development of the FMI students and to support students’ participation in various internship programs. The Career centre is an administrative unit of FMI.
The activities of the Career centre are:
- Dissemination of information for projects, programs, competitions and other events of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, the National Employment Agency and others;
- Providing students from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics with information about the labour market, specific employers and the internships and jobs they offer;
- Organizing and conducting presentations, seminars, tutorials, career days and others with the participation of employers and business representatives;
- Career guidance and counselling for FMI students.
Thus the Career centre establishes useful contacts of the students with employers and specialists in various fields.
More than 70 companies have signed a cooperation agreement with FMI through the Career centre. These companies offer internships for the bachelor students after their second year of study. Under particular rules these internships are recognized as two elective courses: Internship in informatics and Internship in Mathematics. These internships help linking of the theoretical knowledge with practical skills. The benefits for the students are:
- Practical experience in a real working environment;
- Development of good work habits;
- Developing skills for successful performance, communication, teamwork, time management, problem solving and more;
- Gaining real work experience while still studying, which will help them to present themselves better at the next stage of their career development;
- Guidance by a competent mentor from academia;
- Awarding academic credits for successful completion of the internship.
What are the benefits for the FMI activity as Educational center of ECMI?
First, the bachelor students, having internships in the companies, acquire a taste for application of mathematics to real world problems and they choose our Master Program “Computational mathematics and mathematical modeling” (MP CMMM). Many of these students continue their connections with the companies and keep the interest to the problems, considered there. In many cases the further investigations on these problems grow into good master‘s theses. Such examples will be given in a next post.
Some of the companies have been involved in the Study groups with industry, organized by FMI and other Bulgarian members of ECMI. Such cooperation occurred to be very fruitful.
Specialists from the companies are invited regularly as lectors, proposing real life problems to the students at the Mathematical Modelling seminar. This seminar is mandatory for the master students from MP CMMM, but is also attended by many other FMI students.
The fruitful cooperation will continue further.