École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy

The École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy or ENSMN, les Mines, Mines de Nancy, is one of the French "generalist" engineering Grandes Ecoles.

It is located in the city of Nancy, in the east of France. Despite its small size (around 140 students in a year, with approximately 30% female), it is well represented in French industry.

It was created in 1919 on the request of the University of Nancy in order to participate in the reconstruction effort after World War I. At the end of the 1950s, under the impulse of its then-director Bertrand Schwartz (younger brother of Laurent Schwartz), the school reorganized its curriculum to include a balanced blend of engineering, management and social sciences. At the time, it was an innovative educational model for engineers, that was later extended to other Grandes Ecoles.

Its former vocation to train mining engineers evolved in the course of time, because of technological progress and transformations of society. ENSMN has become nowadays a "generalist" school, with a broad variety of disciplines (all types of engineering, as well as the management sciences and computer sciences). Its students for the most part hold management positions in industry and large corporations, but some of them prefer scientific research in any of the French research institutes (such as CNRS or INRIA), or abroad.

Some of its famous alumni include :
* Jean-Claude Trichet
* Bertrand Méheut
* Philippe Guillemot

External links

* [http://www.mines.u-nancy.fr/ Site of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Mines de Nancy]
* [http://www.gemtech.fr/ Site of the Group des Ecoles des Mines]