There are four possibilities to fulfill the Internships course that corresponds to the following tracks, depending on your situation
Track 1 – Validation with previous work experience
This track is thought for students with previous working experience in the scope of Artificial Intelligence. You will need to certify at least 400 hours of work experience in AI related tasks inside a contract that covers a minimum of four months. The contract may have been in a company or organisation, including research contracts at the University or any of its associated centres.
You can also ask for validation if your contract overlaps with the ongoing academic semester, provided that you complete the 400 hours and four months in time for applying for the validation before the end of the semester.
What to do? send an application addressed to the Faculty Dean following using the application form below, together with the following documentation:
- Validation application form
- A report signed by some contact person from the company or organisation where the working activity took place briefly describing the AI related tasks developed by the student during the activity period
- A copy of the contract where the activities were framed
- A recent employment history report (informe de vida laboral from Social Security)
You can submit all this documentation physically at the CS School Administration Office (Secretaría de la Facultad de Informática) or by e-mail (sent from your @udc.es mail account) to negociado_dot_fic_at_udc_dot_es.
Track 2 – The student contacts with a company on her own
A second possibility is that you previously contact some company on your own and you get an offer from them to develop the internship. If that is the case, an important preliminary step is to check whether the company has already signed an agreement with the University of A Coruña for offering official internships or not. These agreements have a standard duration of 4 years and after that, the must be renewed. Many IT companies have ongoing agreements and, if so, you would not have to do anything else. But if the company has no signed agreement, then is an important prerequisite to fulfill. You can find an agreement form below, that must be signed by a company representative and then addressed to the Master Coordinator who will further redirect it to the University Rector.
- External Internships agreement form (Galician-English)
- Link to other form versions in different languages (Galician only; Spanish-Galician)
Once an agreement is signed and active, the next step is submitting a Training Plan proposal (plan formativo) to the Academic Comission. Jump to -> Training Plan.
Track 3 – The student contacts with a university research group
A third possibility, which is similar to Track 2, is that you previously contact some research group in the University of A Coruña (UDC) on your own, to develop the internship working at that research group. Since the work is going to be done at UDC, there is no need of a previous agreement with a third party. However, this process can be substantially slower, as requires a previous public call.
- First, two different supervisors from the UDC group must be designated: one acting as an academic tutor and another one acting as a professional tutor.
- Second, the academic tutor must make an application of internship proposal to the UDC Internships Committee (Comisión de Prácticas) which is an external committee that has scarce regular meetings and will decide whether the internship proposal can be approved (without any student assignment).
- Once this Committee approves the proposal, the tutors will make a public call to cover the position and examine the student applications, if there are several ones.
- Finally, the tutors will assign a given student and communicate this decision to the Master Coordinator. As in Track 2, the next step is submitting a Training Plan proposal (plan formativo) to the Academic Comission. Jump to -> Training Plan.
Track 4 – Public bid
This is the default track, in case you don’t have previous working experience in contracts related to AI or you didn’t contact anyone else to do the internship on your own. We will publish a list of internship offers at the Microsoft Teams group for the Internship course and a form for applying for your preferences. You will also have to attach an academic certificate, since the preliminary assignment will be based on the students’ preferences and their grades.
Offers in the public bid will more or less follow the following structure:
Once a first assignment is made, some companies may require an additional interview. If the interview is not successful, we will proceed to propose another interview to the next assigned student following the previously established priority order.
Once you are assigned an internship following this public bid, a training plan (see next item) will be prepared and signed, before you can start with the activity, but in this track, you will not have to do anything for that purpose other than waiting until the plan is already signed.
Training plan
The training plan (plan formativo) is a document describing the activities to be done, the place and time of the working activity, the total number of hours involved, and other general information and contact data. You can find an empty training plan form below:
Important: if the internship is not funded (the company does not pay a salary), be aware that the student’s Social Security expenses will be covered by the University. This requires a previous administrative process that may delay the internship period. If you are in this situation, please contact immediately with the Master coordinator before deciding the internship dates.
Other forms
You can find more forms and templates from the UDC at the following link.