WEEX: a week to meet society's challenges

Solving engineering projects to meet societal challenges

During this WEEX, Centrale Lyon's student engineers split up into teams around three themes linked to major transitions:

• Hydrogen: study of the production, regulation and consumption of renewable energies within an eco-district
• Wind power : implementation and optimization of a wind farm on a fictitious island, simulation of crisis management following various disturbances
• Waste and pollution : calculation of emissions from industrial or agricultural facilities, propagation simulation, study of deposition and impacts on human health

A major challengewhere students must build on their scientific background from the common core while mobilizing their ability to lead a project in a team and manage the resulting choices.

We work in teams of five or six, and we form the teams ourselves. We learn to divide up the tasks because, in practice, there are few contexts in which we really work alone! Not everyone has the same affinity with the same subjects, so each of us uses what we know best, and then we discuss our choices and our different hypotheses.

Alice, student engineer

Put yourself in an engineer's shoes

In fact, this immersive experience enables them to get out of the student posture and confront concrete, current issues. Unlike a traditional academic exercise, no predefined solutions are provided; students must develop their own strategies and present deliverables at meetings simulating interactions with stakeholders. This approach pushes them to develop their autonomy and team spirit.

They are much more in a professional engineering posture, with customer meetings [...] and they choose a strategy to defend their arguments and mobilize the knowledge they have acquired elsewhere.

Jean-Pierre Cloarec, Professor of Materials Chemistry

I'd already taken part in practical work at Centrale Lyon, but WEEX allows us to think about problems we might encounter in the workplace. It's a format that allows us to be more immersed and get away from pure research.

Lila, CPES student at ENS Lyon