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International > History

Milestones in our journey into an open world

1968: a key agreement

Exactly five years after Chancellor Adenauer and President De Gaulle put their names to the Franco-German Reconciliation Accords, the first official Franco-German university partnership was signed. This was on December 12, 1968, in Lyon: Centrale Lyon and the Technische Universität Darmstadt pioneered the idea of international student exchange.
To this day, this partnership agreement stands as a paradigm of Franco-German co-operation, as could be seen from the grand scale on which its 35th anniversary was celebrated in Lyon in September 2003.

Centrale Lyon - TU Darmstadt: 35 years of student exchange

Centrale Graduate School

To secure a higher profile on the global scene, in 1990 Centrale Lyon teamed up with three other French elite engineering schools, the so called French Grandes Ecoles, we felt close to in culture: Centrale Lille, Nantes and Paris. 
It gave birth to Centrale Graduate School which now enjoys a scale rivaling the biggest European or American universities.
The four schools do their international recruitment of core-syllabus engineering students via Centrale Graduate School.
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Tangible results

The 80s were for us the decade of the USA and Japan; the 90s - Central and Eastern Europe, and China; then in the year 2000, Centrale Lyon began forging partnerships in South America. These openings have notably led to:

Over 50 active partnerships in all 5 continents.
Structured academic networks, such as TIME.
15% of our student engineers are recruited from partner universities.
A third of our students are doing at least one year abroad.
Double Degrees: a certificate of excellence.
More than 2,100 students have already been able to take advantage of these arrangements in Europe. Agreements are now under way with China, Brazil and Indonesia. In 2003, we received 25 Chinese students and 13 Brazilians in the 1st year of our engineering cycle.
A hundred or so of our own students got their MSc while studying in the States or Japan.
Recognition: a Centrale student was the first Westerner to get a Russian Master's in engineering science from Moscow State Technical University-Bauman; another was the first European to get a double European/Brazilian degree.
Business support: over a period of 20 years, IHI has taken a hundred or more of our students on internships, and SNECMA is backing our development in China.
Our labs are winning European R&D tenders.
And many foreign doctoral and post-doctoral researchers are at work in our laboratories.


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