A 4-week internship is a compulsory part of the students' curriculum. With an internship abroad, we aimed to add the following values: - The students had the opportunity to experience and compare the education system and the relationship with the business community of another country. - The students could compare certain attitudes (punctuality, working in a team, commitment, safety,..) and test their importance in practice. - The students were able to broaden their cultural baggage and they learned to use a different language (English) in function of their field of study and in dealing with the population/employees - Our students increased their independence and self-reliance, among other things, because they could work in the country on a self-catering basis. resided abroad. This also gave them a greater sense of self-esteem and self-confidence - We wanted to raise our students as critical world citizens with a view to diversity. This internship abroad was an ideal tool for this. We also wanted to give the supervising teachers a broader view of education and business in another country/culture in order to test their own approach against that locally.
This project was a logical continuation of our previous projects. In addition to a qualitative goal, we also set a quantitative goal. We wanted to send 20 students on an internship every year. Over the past 2 years there has been a huge increase in the number of students who wanted to do an internship abroad. This success was partly due to larger class groups, but we also saw that relatively more students opted for an internship abroad instead of a domestic internship. We could only applaud this. Fortunately, we had expanded our network to 6 partner countries in recent years so that we could absorb this increase more easily. The students we sent out in recent years still came from 7BSO (Industrial woodworking, industrial electricity and computer-controlled machine tools) and 7TSO (industrial maintenance techniques). With our previous projects we had sent more than 150 students on a foreign internship to 6 different countries. We wanted to continue in this way.