EPIC GuideIndustry internships
At the school of Computer and Communication Sciences, it is common for PhD students to do internships. These internships mostly take place during summer, when you don’t have courses to take or TA. Usually, an internship is in the area of your research, but that does not need to be the case. It is recommended to discuss with your supervisor before applying / getting an internship. She/he might have concerns, or refer you to particularly interesting opportunities.
Technically, while on an internship, you will take a “leave of absence” from EPFL, but it will still count towards your time limit for finishing your PhD. You need to ask the doctoral school for approval. EPFL’s accident insurance can be prolonged up to 6 months for a fee. Doing an internship does not gain you an exemption from TAing: if your internship significantly overlaps with the academic semester such that you cannot fulfill your TA duties, you will lose the exemption that you would otherwise have for your last semester.
The canton of Zürich has special rules for “third-country nationals” (i.e. non-Swiss, non-EU/EFTA) interning in the canton. Any employer hiring an intern has to apply for and receive a work authorization, and the large ones (e.g. Oracle Labs, Google) typically delegate this to legal consultancies (e.g. KPMG). Unfortunately, different consultancies—or even different consultants within the same agency—sometimes read the rules differently, and some will refuse to apply for a work authorization in situations where others would have successfully applied without issue. The reasons they give may include (based on a real case with Oracle and KPMG):
- Being an “intern” on paper instead of an “employee”. However, plenty of EDIC students have officially been hired as “intern”s in the past.
- Not having a certificate from the doctoral program that the internship is “mandatory”. However, EDIC provides a standard certificate saying that it is “integral” and “essential” to your studies, and advisors can add letters of support to say whatever they want, and this has been enough for EDIC students in most cases.
These reasons are all based on a consultant’s conservative reading of the rules, and not because the application was actually denied by the canton. In official bureaucratic jargon, this is known as a “CYA policy”. If this happens to you, the best thing to do is to put the legal consultancy in contact with the EDIC admins.