Startup Internship – Incubation ETCS programme

A practice-based entrepreneurial journey combining repeated business development, feedback, and reflection with academic learning

  • Gain hands-on experience working in your own or another startup
  • Combine your entrepreneurial personal & business development with your academic studies, developing your analytical & practical skills
  • Earn ECTS through developing an internship paper that supports your entrepreneurial business challenge

The ECTS credit transfer is a collaboration between CBS and CSE, where CSE is your workplace, and CBS provides academic and examination responsibilities.

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Who can do an internship in a startup?​

This specific type of CSE Incubation experience CBS students can only do during their elective course choice semester, either on the

 

  • 5th semester of the bachelor’s degree or 
  • 3rd semester of the master’s degree.

If you are not a CBS Student, it may be possible to do the CSE Internship as part of an exchange or single elective course. Please check with your university and study programme what is possible.

 

To take part, you need to commit to working on your own startup for the full length of the course, as your internship.

Your startup can be at any stage. You might still be exploring problems and generating ideas, or you might be validating, prototyping, developing your product or service, growing or scaling. It doesn’t need to be incorporated or validated when your internship begins.

What you gain from the internship

Become more effective in how to gain value and input from founders and experts in short, meaningful discussions

Practice in identifying top priorities in your startup that support your development

Collect and tell a clear, evidence-based story about your startup

Continue validating different parts of your startup primarily through founder and expert support

Develop your own structure and accountability mechanisms to support your founder and startup growth

Determine what is your ‘NEXT’ post internship period

Applying for an ECTS internship in your own startup

You apply in two places at the same time: to CSE for a place on the incubation programme, and to CBS to get the internship approved for ECTS. You need both to be accepted.

Step 1: Apply to CSE

Apply to the CSE Startup Internship – Incubation Programme here.

 

Deadline: 15 January for the spring semester, or 15 August for the fall semester.

 

 

If you’ve already been part of a CSE incubation cohort, you still need to apply. The startup internship is a separate four-month programme built to help you combine your startup with your studies and earn ECTS for it.

Step 2: Get approval from CBS

How you do this depends on your study programme. You’ll follow one of two routes, and each has its own deadlines.

 

Route A: Course elective

 

  1. Register for one of these electives:
    • BSc: Startup Internship at CSE
    • MSc: CSE Entrepreneurship Programme
  2. Check whether the elective is on your positive list on myCBS under Choice of electives and Registration for electives and minors.
  3. Once the elective is approved, find an academic supervisor. You need one no later than two weeks before the course starts.

 

Route B: Academic internship

 

  1. Apply for approval of an academic internship in your own startup. CSE acts as your host organisation and signs the internship contract, which you then submit to your study board. You’ll find the rules and the forms you need on myCBS under Academic internship.
  2. Find an academic supervisor at the same time, since you need one to submit your forms.