Vice President of French Yncréa, Vincent Hicks

Dear Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good afternoon! I am so honored to attend this meeting today. First of all, I would like to thank the organizers for their kind invitation and thanks for your warm reception.

In fact, I have always maintained a strong interest in the initiative of the Belt and Road. I am also very much looking forward to strengthening cooperation between the schools under this framework.

First of all, I want to introduce to you. My name is Vincent Hicks, which means "six" in Chinese. I hope everyone can remember. My career started as a structural engineer. The main area of my research is reinforced concrete, so I have great interest and high hope for this international consortium. Then I would like to tell you about our school. The full name of the school is called French Yncréa. I am mainly responsible for civil engineering and architecture. I used to be the head of the department and became the general manager of HEI in 2015. In addition, I am also the Vice President of Training and Teaching Law at our school. So what can our school offer to everyone? Then I will give you a brief introduction to our school. Our school was established in 2016 and consists of three units, namely HEI, ISA, and ISEN. Among them, HEI was established in 1885 and has a history of more than 130 years. Now, please pay attention to this PowerPoint. The total number of academics in Yncréa is more than 5,500, and the total number of graduates exceeds 27,000. It can be said that our alumni network is very powerful. In addition, there are more than 500 faculty and researchers in the school, more than 2,500 industry partners, and more than 300 international academic institutions, and 25 certified research laboratory.

France is known for its outstanding engineering quality. Our engineering degree is also awarded after five years of professional training after graduating from high school. If you want to enter our French academic research institutions for further study, you must go through a very strict screening. It is for this reason that we are considered to be one of the more than 200 engineering schools in France. There are more than 200 engineering schools in a country. This is not too much. In addition, many students in our school are awarded French engineering degrees every year, more than 35,000 per year, of which more than 5,000 are from international students, while the total number of students awarded in France is 2.5 million. Now, the main mission of our school is to provide support for the company and provide them with better engineers and managers. We graduate more than 1,000 engineers every year, and more than 97% of them are found within four months of graduation. Among all graduates, 15% to 20% of students will be employed overseas.

Therefore, a basic mission of HEI is to provide high-quality training for engineers, improve them professional skills and sense of responsibility, enable them to be competent in important technical positions, and play a leading role in the team, while having an international, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Please see the next page for HEI.

I have just told you that HEI was first established in 1885. Today, HEI has 2,400 students, and HEI will award a certificate, which is a general engineering degree. We have three campuses, two in Lilan and one in central France. We have 450 engineers a year, and we have a very important network of alumni. Everyone can also see the total number of graduates in this area, which has reached 16,600. I used to tell you that the big advantage of our school is the network of our alumni and alumni resources. The three main activities carried out by the school include teaching research and support for the industry.

As you can see from here, we will provide teaching activities in 14 major areas. One is civil engineering, which includes architectural design, mechanics and so on. We have worked with two architecture colleges. One is the bling architectural school and the other is Leroux, a well-known institution in Belgium. In addition, there are related projects in the smart city, which are all taught in English. I think this is a good opportunity for international students to study abroad. Later, we will introduce you further. In addition, we will tell students how to deal with problems in real life. After they see the project on the spot, they will come back to do a corresponding simulation and design in this environment. We also pay great attention to interdisciplinary training, and our courses are taught in English. In order to further increase students' communication skills and cultivate their international perspective, we adopt a cooperative and innovative working mode in teaching. The main purpose is to simulate the problems faced by students in the construction of smart cities. These training programs, in general, are designed to increase students' creativity and cooperation. This is an example of our cooperation. We can introduce a cooperative degree program to you, which is mainly the support of cooperation between BUCEA and HEI. The project of smart city development is a joint project between our school and Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Chinese students are welcome to come here for training. We mainly provide two years of engineering academic courses. So here is a video to everyone, of course, it is played in French, but the subtitles are Chinese, please watch it.

Everyone can see our HEI campus on the video.

Thank you all!

(Compiled according to the shorthand record at the conference)