Applications for a placement in such a prestigious centre are numerous and the work demanded of the trainees is challenging. As the school's first concern is to ensure that students reap a maximum benefit from their internships, the type of work given to retained students is both demanding and valuable to those involved.

The EDHEC Risk and Management Research Centre is highly business-oriented, conducting research for business to help professionals and partners (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Barclays Global Investors to name but a few) enrich their knowledge of the markets, introduce innovative products and improve their techniques.  Students chosen to work for the center quickly become operational and are given motivating  projects to work on. These projects allow them to further improve their skills and put into practice their theoretical knowledge.

Peter O'Kelly, Marketing Manager of the Risk and Asset Management Research Centre knows the students who work in the centre well, many of them having participated in the preparation of the Hedge Fund Days organized by EDHEC in London last February. "These trainees helped us improve our database and during the event they learned the cutting edge techniques presented by the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre. Moreover students were able to witness the way EDHEC communicates with professionals and acknowledge the respect the business world has for EDHEC Business School and our research. "  According to Mr. O'Kelly "Recruiting those EDHEC students involved no risk for EDHEC as there was no doubt about the excellence of their education.  In addition, what makes MSc graduates particularly attractive for us is their strong international profile, a quality we value highly since the vast majority of the center's work is internationally oriented. It really is a privilege for us to have them in our team. It is also a great opportunity for them to work with us as by working for the centre they can start creating their own network and at the same time live the intensive experience of working in the environment of a highly respected research centre."

During their internship in the Research Centre, EDHEC students have two major activities:

1)  They offer assistance to the marketing team by contacting industry professionals, and helping collect data.

2)  They actively participate in projects by offering their expertise in performing market and business and industry analysis and by collecting information for indexes, new products and regulations.

As students participate in all stages of research they are allowed to publish articles on their findings, under the supervision of experienced researchers. These results are communicated to the centre's 43 000 professional contacts worldwide, effectively meaning that trainees can therefore have their articles read by many of the major players in the business world.  Recently for example, EDHEC students actively participated in a major European survey on the way investors use fixed income derivatives, a study which attracted the interest of the international press.

Mr. Felix Goltz, a researcher who works with the EDHEC trainees in the Centre believes that students have excellent theoretical skills thanks to courses included in the MSc programmes such as alternative investments, portfolio management, fixed income, options and futures and financial engineering. These courses enable students to understand the goal of each project and the way they should act.   Mr. Goltz states that Of course these students have excellent technical skills but what makes them really special is their analytical and critical capacities, the ability to filter big quantities of information and keep the details that are really important in the research process. It is impressive that students working in our center advance so quickly in a subject that they were not necessarily familiar with. Trainees from the EDHEC MSc programmes need a very short time to become fully operational and a valuable members of the team.

Lin Li, a Chinese student in the 2004-05 MSc in Finance programme has been working for almost a year at the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre. She has already participated in different studies and published articles and is currently working on research on the real estate industry that will be presented by the Centre in the near future. As a trainee in the Center, she knows she has acquired valuable professional experience that will be extremely useful in the future when, according to her wish, she continues her career in the corporate finance sector in her home country.