Stages and Jobs

Several students ask me to act as tutor for their post-lauream stage.

Although I recognize that stages are an excellent opportunity for students, I would like to point out the following points.

  • Stages represent an overhead for me, as my position does not include any tutoring activity; I can act as tutor, but please take into account that this is not part of my job and I have no rewards whatsoever for doing this (instead, this represents a penalty, since this basically a sort of "charity work" that consumes part of my time).

  • The stage is intended as a "formative project", i.e. the student has to learn, not just to work and my signature, on behalf of my employee (Politecnico di Torino) is intended to certify exactly this. Most companies are interested in stages instead of hiring a new employee because of the fiscal advantages they have.

  • I will not accept anything that looks like a masqueraded hiring. So, please contact me only if you have already a "learning plan" ready, in agreement with your future employee.

In case I approve the learning plan and I accept to act as tutor, please take into account that I would like to receive:

  • the learning plan from the employer, not from the student, possibly accompanied by a phone call in which he tells me the reason why a .stage is needed The reason is that I want to be sure that the employer agrees on the learning plan and it is aware that this is a stage, not a full job;

  • a monthly report from the student, assessing the progress of the learning plan (a short email is fine);

  • a final report (possibly the student coming in person to my office) telling me what it has been done, how the student felt with his employer, and in general everything that may be interesting for me to suggest/discourage further stages with that employer

  • a small report (a short email is fine) from the employer with a concise evaluation of the stage and of the student.

I would like to stress that those requirements are not just overheads for the student and the employer; instead, they represent a way to verify that the stage is used for what it was defined for, and that the student really took advantage from this experience.

For more info about documentation required by Politecnico, please check the "Tirocinio Curriculare" pages in the Politecnico di Torino web site.

Finally, for who is interested, please take a look at this guide (in Italian): Guida Anti-Inculata per laureandi in Informatica e Ingegneria Informatica. Some sentences are probably exaggerated, but the post is worth reading anyway.