Each year, the Fondation Mines-Télécom highlights the achievements of students from Institut Mines-Télécom schools and awards them the Best Apprenticeship Award and the Best Final-Year Internship Award. Nicolas Robbe is among the 17 selected candidates.
In one month, the Fondation Mines-Télécom Awards ceremony will take place in Paris. Among the candidates, two students from Mines Saint-Étienne stand out. We have already dedicated an article to Catarina Heimlich (ICM) and now it is Nicolas Robbe’s (SEE) turn, a young engineer passionate about electronics and astronomy, in the running for the Best Apprenticeship Award. Having completed a DUT in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Computing (GEII), he joined Mines Saint-Étienne in 2022 to pursue the Specialized Engineering in Embedded Electronic Systems (SEE) program in partnership with ISTP, and today he answers our questions!
☝️ Can you tell us about your apprenticeship?
I completed my engineering program as an apprentice, studying in Saint-Étienne half the time and working at Thales in the Paris region the other half.
At Thales, I worked in the RadioNavigation Products department, which specializes in designing radar and radio equipment for aeronautical navigation, for both civil and military markets.
My mission: to design a technical demonstrator for a miniaturized radio altimeter, intended for small drones. A radio altimeter is a radar installed on an aircraft that measures its height above the ground by emitting a radio wave toward it and measuring the time it takes to propagate between the aircraft and the ground.
This apprenticeship brought me a great deal in several areas:
- First, in terms of technical skills, I made significant progress in electronics, embedded development, radio, physics, signal processing…
- But I also discovered the corporate world and its particularities, the management of an ambitious technical project, working in design offices and laboratories…
- Finally, and because it is an important element, the apprenticeship also allowed me to achieve financial independence.
On the other hand, for Thales and particularly for my department, my apprenticeship first enabled a detailed state-of-the-art technological review and updated their knowledge from both a “technical” and “market knowledge” perspective.
I was also the first in my department to adopt a “Model-Based Design” methodology, and thanks to my feedback, several of my colleagues subsequently applied this methodology to their projects.
In the long term, if my prototype is developed into an industrializable product, it could enable Thales to complete its range of radio altimeters and enter new markets.
☝️ How did Mines Saint-Étienne prepare you for this internship?
The technical topics I addressed in the company were rarely synchronized with what I was learning at school. It did happen occasionally, such as during my signal processing courses. At times, the “academic” part came before the “practical” part, but in the opposite situation, I also learned to self-train and develop skills on my own… So it was an exercise in adaptation!
However, many project management elements covered at the beginning of the program were immediately very useful to me, as I was leading a “brand new” project where everything had to be done.
☝️ If you win, what will the Fondation Mines-Télécom Award bring you?
Winning the Best Apprenticeship Award would be the culmination of these three years of commitment! Unless you have experienced it, it is difficult to imagine how intense an apprenticeship can be in terms of pace, organization, and lifestyle.
While I am proud of what I accomplished during my apprenticeship, I am the first to believe that my success is not individual, but that of an entire group: my apprenticeship supervisor, my colleagues, my academic advisor, my instructors…
Winning this award would therefore acknowledge the commitment of all these people, without whom I would never have reached this point!
☝️ Where does your career stand since the end of this internship?
Following my apprenticeship, I completed my final-year internship at the European Space Agency, ESA, in the Netherlands. There, in addition to cycling several thousand kilometers, I worked on telecommunications for the Celeste mission. I met people from all over Europe and co-authored my first scientific article!
Upon my return to France, for the next step in my career, I decided to change scale by joining TrustComs, a small company specializing in the design of anti-drone systems. My activities there are very diverse: I move from R&D design work to validating equipment on the production line, and to the field to meet clients, supervise equipment installation, train operators…
It is a very enriching experience, and highly complementary to what I experienced throughout my studies.
🏆 We thank Nicolas Robbe for answering our questions and congratulate him on this exemplary start to his career! We will closely follow the results of the Fondation Mines-Télécom Awards and until then, we are keeping our fingers crossed that Nicolas’s achievements will be recognized!
