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Internships – mandatory or voluntary?

The main difference is that with voluntary internships your salary (if there is) will be “gross” (taxes apply and will be deducted) and in your mandatory internship, it will be net. Moreover, for voluntary internships (extracurricular) the company needs to offer a minimum wage salary which is currently 8.84 € per hour and for mandatory internships (curricular) it can be unpaid or with a salaray lower than minimum wage. During a mandatory internship students are covered by their regular student health insurance, whereas conditions might differ for voluntary internships, which means your employer has to pay for social security. For the above mentioned reasons most companies will be interested in hiring interns for mandatory internships. As there is no mandatory internship included in the Medical Engineering Master’s programme, however, we cannot issue you any certificates regarding that matter.

You are welcome to carry out voluntary internships if you wish. Please note that in most cases intermediate to advanced German skills are required (B1 or higher). Although we cannot arrange internships for you, we offer you an overview over medical engineering companies in the Erlangen region, which engage in the field of medical image and data processing. Please contact the companies yourself and ask if you can apply as an intern. We highly recommend that you file a petition for a “vacation semester”/study leave (detailed info here) if your intership covers at least seven weeks of the lecture period, as your internship will not count as a regular study semester this way (important for visa extension!).

Student jobs, working students and student assistants

You can find a broad range of jobs for students (related to engineering or not) in our FAU job portal “Stellenwerk” (in German). If you would like to work as a student assistant at the university we recommend to regularly have a look at the job offer section in UnivIS. The InfoCentre section on the website of our Central Institute for Healthcare Engineering (ZiMT)  is a good source of information for job offers in the medtech area. Apart from that, it is always a good idea to look around the notice boards around campus, for many companies advertise internships and student jobs there.

If you need help with your job search, your application documents or preparinga job interview feel free to refer to our Career Service.

IMPORTANT: As a Non-EU citizen you are only allowed to work under specific conditions. Please contact your respective Foreigners’ Office if you have any doubts.