Descriptif

This lecture series brings students into direct contact with senior practitioners from consulting, finance, insurance, industry, the public sector, and academia. Past sessions have featured speakers from Roland Berger, Rothschild & Co, Estin & Co, JP Morgan, Blackstone, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, the European Investment Bank, Descartes Underwriting, Pretto, Louis Vuitton, CREST, and Sciences Po, on topics ranging from electric mobility and parametric insurance to sovereign debt crises and the economics of luxury production.

The course is not a sequence of career testimonials. Each session is built around substantive content — a sector, a business model, a policy problem, a technical question — that speakers address from the vantage point of people who make decisions under real constraints. Students are expected to prepare to read the basics in the field, identify the notions that matter, and arrive with questions worth a practitioner's time.

Its second distinguishing feature is that students co-construct the program. Working with the instructor, they propose themes and speakers, take part in the selection of sessions, and help organize them, including on-site visits to firms where feasible. The instructor's role is less to lecture than to help students define what they want from the series and then reach it: identifying and securing relevant speakers, structuring sessions, and transmitting past experience.

The series therefore pursues three objectives: exposure to scientific and sectoral content that complements the core curriculum; a broadened view of the range of careers open to graduates, including those students have not yet heard of; and the development of professional presence in settings where students represent both themselves and the program.

Assessment reflects these aims. It rests on preparation, on the quality of questions asked in session, on the use of informal interactions with speakers, and on active involvement in proposing and organizing sessions. Punctuality, engagement, and professional dress are expected throughout. A survey is administered at the end of the cycle and completing it is mandatory: it feeds the design of the following year's series, and it counts towards the grade.