Abstract
Much of the research focuses on students' expectations of the business world and seems to ignore what surprises them once they are confronted with its reality. Our study aims to better understand their apprehension and understanding of work in a company when they take their first steps in it and take a new look at what surrounds them: are these astonishments positive or negative? Do the students have an opinion on the practices, relational modalities and functioning they observe? (Method) The research was based on a corpus of 313 posts written by young French people in internships around the world, born between 1996 and 1998. A three-step analysis: (i) automated textometric analysis, (ii) a selection of keywords, and (iii) a manual content analysis, allowed us to bring out the sources of astonishment in their discourse. (Findings) While demonstrating that these astonishments are part of a generational as well as cultural continuum, our findings suggest that taking these astonishments into account for companies and training organizations is a real opportunity, as much as ignoring them carries risks. Our study makes recommendations in this regard.