Overview

The École Centrale de Lyon (ECL) is one of the top higher education schools in France. Admitted students have typically studied for two (or three) years after their high-school diploma. The educational system in France is very different from the system in the US. There is no four-year bachelor degree. Instead, at the end of their studies, students obtain a five-year degree equivalent to a Masters in the US.

This document presents the system of Grandes Écoles and this document presents ECL in more detail.

Curriculum

Unlike undergraduate studies in the US, ECL mandates that students take classes in a wide spectrum of domains. During my two years at ECL, I took courses ranging from modern languages, to philosophy, to material science, to mechanics, to mathematics and computer science. The aim of such a curriculum is to give the students a taste and understanding of as wide an array of areas to allow him to specialize in the last year.

You can find a list of courses I took during the first year and during the second year.

Projects

During the two years at ECL, I worked on two major projects. These projects were specifically aimed at showing us how to lead a long-term project and how to work as a group to meet objectives. The projects were associated with classes on group management and project management.

Tablegate

The Tablegate project aimed at providing a useful application to an interactive table system. We developed WordTab which allows users to interact with a Word document and modify its content using a touch-sensitive table. This approach fosters collaboration within a group as all members can gather around the table (rather large) and simultaneously make changes to the document. At the end of the 15 month project, we had a working prototype that we had tested on people in our school.

The report for this project can be found here (in French).

Bazadmin

The Bazadmin project aimed at creating a full network administration framework for the student network at ECL. As part of the team responsible for managing the student network, I was faced with the usual problems of virus-spreading machines, excessive P2P usage, etc. The application developped through this project gives the administrators of the network a global view of all connections and allows them to individually monitor each machine. It also features an interface for the users who can see the status of their connection and potential problems that have been detected with it. This system is currently still in use at ECL and has considerably simplified and automated network tasks.

This software is freely available and you can check out the source here. I also have documentation available if interested.