So, it is September again. Which means preparing the garden for winter…and a season of slippery roads. But also, new beginnings in almost all academic programs. At Ecole Polytechnique, our engineering students are doing push-ups – but, we also have graduate students joining our Masters and Doctoral programs such as the elite Masters program in Advanced Communication Networks.
Last Friday was the official welcome (& student-faculty mingling cocktail). And this week, courses started. On Future Internet Technology, on advanced mathematical modeling, on the physical limits of communication, on challenges and opportunities in computer networking – and, of course, with a healthy dose of research projects thrown in for good measure, on which we faculty get to work with the students for the full academic year.
Fabien Mathieu introducing his course on…the Pirate Bay??? To students in the elite Masters program in Advanced Communication Networks
This particular program is an elite program. It aims at training future researchers, most of whom will find a PhD as the natural next-step upon graduating with their Masters. It is a program very deliberately favoring quality over quantity – I think in 2016 we retained <10% of the candidates who applied.
Students in the elite Masters program in Advanced Communication Networks
As a consequence, of course, we get students whose Masters projects result in publishable research, with whom we can work very closely and intensively with an attractive student-to-faculty ratio. And, we get fantastic PhD students from the program.
So, welcome to the 2016 ACN Masters students. I am looking forward to working closely with you, getting to know you, and tomdo ground-breaking research with you in the year to come (and beyond!)
This Is a joint program between the faculty at Ecole Polytechnique, and our colleagues at Telecom-ParisTech – in cooperation with, and with participation from, leading industrial research institutions, including Cisco “Paris Innovation and Research Laboratory” and Nokia-BellLabs