Your first steps as a student engineer

The first year at École Centrale de Lille marks a real break with your preparatory classes. As soon as you arrive, you’ll experience two of the highlights of the course: Starting Block-Start & Go, a series of workshops, lectures, and mini-projects that will give you an insight into the engineering professions.

The core curriculum, which you will follow until the end of your second year, includes scientific subjects as well as economics, humanities, sustainable development, and CSR. There are also up to 3 different modern languages.

You will soon be able to personalise certain modules in your curriculum by choosing subject-specific electives, for example.

Additional diploma

In addition to your first year courses, you have the option of enrolling at the University of Lille, located on the same campus, for a degree in mathematics.

A special course structure allows this degree to be taken over two semesters: S5 and S6.

Common core, essential knowledge

This course aims to provide the theoretical foundations of special relativity, quantum physics and statistical physics, as well as the physical and mathematical concepts and tools needed to understand them properly.

Educational objectives

At the end of the course, students will:

  • Possess a basic knowledge of the structure and fundamental results of modern theoretical physics.

Contribution of the course to the skills reference framework:

  • The ability to understand and formulate the problem (hypotheses, orders of magnitude, etc.);
  • The ability to recognise the specific elements of a problem;
  • The ability to identify interactions between elements;
  • The ability to quickly delve into a subject area.

This course covers the design of data structures, the study of the complexity of algorithms, and the presentation and analysis of several algorithmic techniques (divide and conquer, gluttonous strategy, etc.), which can be used to deal with various data search, information sorting, data compression, and optimisation problems.

Educational objectives

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Represent the internal behaviour of a program in terms of memory allocation and function calls;
  • Estimate the efficiency of an algorithm before programming it;
  • Analyse the effectiveness (temporal and spatial) of a treatment (program) and, if necessary, improve it;
  • Choose the data structures to be created or used and the programming mode (iterative or recursive) best suited to the problem to be addressed and the efficiency constraints to be met;
  • Produce a project in the form of a makefile using the Linux command line;
  • Work as part of a team on an IT project.

Contribution of the course to the skills reference framework:

  • The ability to organise problem-solving;
  • The ability to monitor the problem-solving process;
  • The ability to develop working methods and to organise.

This course aims to introduce students to systems engineering and its implementation using a modelling language (SysML) on a professional modelling tool (Papyrus).

Educational objectives

For the complexity part, at the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Recognise the “complexity challenge” and what this entails in terms of multi-actor logics, emerging players, contradictory logics, the relationship with time, uncertainties, decision-making, etc;
  • Recognise the limits of dualistic thinking and analytical reasoning and begin applying these concepts to systemic thinking.
  • Build simple (manipulable) but complex (without mutilating) representations based on model theory.

For the modelling part, at the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Explain what a model is, what it is for, and who it is for;
  • Explain the main parameters of a modelling activity;
  • apply the fundamentals of a systems engineering process;
  • create models using a modelling language especially for systems engineering (SysML);
  • represent these models using a professional modelling tool (Papyrus).

The aim of this course is to provide students with the main tools for characterising the transformation of a deformable medium and describing its state under mechanical stress (stress tensors). In particular, students will learn about linear thermo-elastic behaviour.

This module is a general introduction to tools for dimensioning structures and systems, and for calculating mechanical behaviour under complex loads.

Educational objectives

This module helps to develop the following skills from the GEC reference framework, which belong to Theme 2 “Understanding complex problems”:

  • As part of the sub-theme “Adopt a global vision and grasp the complexity of the problem”, this module will develop the student’s ability to understand and formulate a linear thermo-elastic mechanics problem (hypotheses, orders of magnitude, etc.);
  • As part of the “Modelling and organising the solution” sub-theme, they will develop their ability to recognise the specific elements of a problem in the mechanics of deformable continuous media (within the linear thermo-elastic framework), to identify the interactions between elements, and to propose one or more solution scenarios;
  • In the sub-theme “Monitor Problem-Solving”, students will develop their ability to converge towards an acceptable solution (following hypotheses, orders of magnitude, etc.).

This course introduces the concepts of mathematical analysis essential to the basic training of an engineer, and which will be used in signal processing, variational calculus (partial differential equations), probability theory and calculus and scientific calculus, for example.

Educational objectives

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Calculate an integral in the Lebesgue sense;
  • Develop a Fourier series function and apply the main results;
  • Calculate a Fourier transform of a function or distribution;
  • Recognise a distribution and solve differential equations in the sense of distributions.

Contribution of the course to the skills reference framework:

  • By the end of the course, students will have made progress in all the skills in Theme 2 (Understanding complex problems).

The aim of this course is to present some of the main methods for analysing social relations at work in organisations. The educational aim is to convince students that a real company can be perceived and analysed rigorously.

Educational objectives

  • Break down the boundaries between disciplines, move away from the “everything controlled and mastered” mindset, and navigate more fluidly through uncertainty;
  • Develop a global, strategic vision of organisations;
  • Adopt a cross-disciplinary vision that is scientific, technological, economic, and societal;
  • Train in decision-making and taking responsibility in uncertain contexts and collaboratively;
  • Learn to work across departments;
  • Understand power dynamics.

At the end of the course, students will:

  • Gain a better understanding of society and the world of work and realise that even the simplest concepts apparently need to be re-examined;
  • Understand, think about, and be able to position oneself regarding the emerging transformations of the company;
  • Produce a scientific, reasoned, and action-oriented discourse on the main themes of organisational theory: the place of the individual in the organisation; power, games, strategies; identities, relationships at work, motivation, involvement at work; decision-making models; change; institutions.

The aim of the course is to provide the fundamental concepts of signal processing for engineers. The first step is to be able to recognise the different families of signals (signal classification) before characterising deterministic and then random signals.

Educational objectives

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Represent a signal intuitively and logically in the time and frequency domains;
  • Navigate effectively between different representations to better understand a physical measurement;
  • Establish links between physical modelling (electronics, mechanics, optics, etc.) and a “system” vision that enables the expected behaviour to be predicted (e.g. link between low-pass filtering and damping);
  • Mae use of abstract theoretical tools while being able to apply them to solve a concrete problem (e.g., understand the concept of optimal filtering and implement it numerically);
  • Acquire the right reflexes when sizing a measurement acquisition system;
étudiants en extérieur avec ordinateur

Would you like to know more about the entire programme?

Discover the course catalogue!

Two key events at the start of the academic year

#starting block

This integration period marks the transition from preparatory classes, where you gradually discover the attitudes expected of a professional engineer!

During the first two weeks, you will engage in workshops to experience teamwork, project building, and standing up for your views and ideas.

There will also be opportunities to explore the world of business and research!

#start&go

You will work in groups of four students on one of these five themes: energy, data science, design & environment, robotics, art & science.

Over the course of six weeks, you will discover new areas of investigation and all the opportunities that will be offered to you throughout your training.

Develop your linguistic potential

Two modern languages (including English) are studied throughout the course.

A LV3 may be chosen as an option: German, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, etc.

All students have access to the GoFluent platform, which allows them to study a language in greater depth or discover a new one, ideal for independent learning on a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

A TOEIC score of 850 (level B2+) is required to obtain the diploma. The official TOEIC test is organised in S7.