The official Germany thread for the class of 2013

<p>@ PTI
SO is it hard to transfer from German colleges and universities like RWTH aachen to US universities?
Also does German law has provision for working during semester (like the 20 hrs per week in US?)
PLease let me know.
ANd thank you for mentioning about the university.
Danke!</p>

<p>Incognito, as far as I know foreign students in Germany are not allowed to work at all. </p>

<p>The curricular standards of German universities are on par with or exceed those at American colleges. However, you should not mind being a number in a lecture hall with 500 seats. Average class sizes are closer to 100 than 10 or 20 as in American universities. That also means that you would have to go out of your way to get to know a few professors well enough to get positive letters of recommendation for your transfer applications.</p>

<p>well, they compare with average US state schools. the worldwide rankings support this assumption.
so, unless you do it for the experience, i think your local state school (think PSU, ASU, OU) will serve you just as well.
if you take travel expenses into account, it might even be more expensive to attend a german school</p>

<p>I might agree if you compared them to the state flagship universities (which all of the universities you referred to are), but I will vehemently disagree with “average US state school.” Lol… Most students at an average US public college would not even qualify to attend a university in Germany. At least considering that in my German state only about the top 20% of each class earn a university entrance qualification…</p>

<p>Sorry that I am offended so easily, but I really think that you are not giving German universities enough credit!</p>

<p>Although not German, I was offended too. I highly rate universities like Berlin University and Jacobs University of Bremen and was disappointed to read PTI’s response. C’mon pal, be a little more generous - and fairer - in your comparisons :)</p>

<p>The following is just anecdotal experience, so deal with it as you please. The courses I took at the University of Wuerzburg were on par with the courses I took at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania, and definitely better than the courses I took at Bryn Mawr. How do American state university courses compare? I don’t know. But Haverford and Penn are among the most selective universities in the US, while I have never heard of Wuerzburg having much of an international reputation…</p>

<p>Another thing to keep in mind is that some German universities (or Wuerzburg, at least) weed out quite a bit. At Wuerzburg it is common practice for departments to fail 80% of the students in the intro classes. Consequently most of the students in higher-level courses are highly motivated or just plain brilliant.</p>

<p>That being said, I still prefer Haverford and Penn over German universities because the atmosphere is just a lot more personal. Back in Germany I never once talked to my professors except about course administrivia. In the US I go to office hours, I play cards with my professors, I talk to them about my summer plans and they share cookies with us. Not to mention that my largest classi n the US is smaller than the smallest class of my friends in Germany (~25 students or so I have heard).</p>

<p>Anyway, I will let this topic rest now. If someone else tries to compare German and American universities, can you please explicitly state your experience with both systems? I assume that many posters in this thread have not taken a class at a university in either country. World University rankings may not be the best basis for comparison either because 2/3 of their weighted criteria measure research activity, which is rather inrelevant for undergraduate students.</p>

<p>[QS</a> Top Universities: Top 100 universities in the THE - QS World University Rankings 2007](<a href=“http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2008/overall_rankings/top_100_universities/]QS”>http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2008/overall_rankings/top_100_universities/)
i was referring to this ranking. there are 3 german universities in the top 100 as compared to 50+ US colleges (thus, it’s not just berkeley and the ivies). i didn’t argue that german universities do a bad job. i think that some of them do amazing research.
HOWEVER, incognito wants to earn a bachelor in science.
If you take student/teacher ration and the amount of money spent for students into account, German universities are more similar to US state schools. And as a result, i would say, so is the teaching quality.
it makes no sense to travel around the globe to find yourself in a lecture hall with 500+ classmates, on a daily basis. us state schools (and not just michigan, berkeley, and uva) would probably offer you smaller classes, profs that are more accessible and more individual attention. german universities should focus more on undergrads. they have great graduate programs and their research has recently earned them 2 nobel prizes. on the undergraduate level (which incognito was talking about) they are falling behind a bit.
PS: Jacobs is a really interesting university. i think it has a great chance of soon having a similar reputation as top colleges from the UK and the US</p>

<p>

Now I see where you are coming from. I guess we should clarify what we mean by “teaching quality” then. What bothers me about classes at Bryn Mawr is that they move significantly slower than classes at Haverford or Penn or Wuerzburg (and thus cover less material in the same course) because they are targeted at students who need more time picking up new material. The lectures in Wuerzburg were otherwise very similar to the ones at Haverford and Penn, except that there were 50-300 students in the room instead of 4-30 (which does not matter all that much for sciences anyway). </p>

<p>In that respect I would expect the “teaching quality” at an average American state school to be much lower than at German universities because the state schools are less selective. On the other hand, if you measure the teaching quality in terms of how many students are in the room, then the American universities win.</p>

<p>

That’s an interesting take because I thought it was exactly the other way round. If you know what you want to study and if you would like to focus on a particular field, then you can learn a lot more as an undergraduate at a German university than at most American universities. (Of course if you don’t want to specialize, you will be miserable in Germany.) On the other hand a <em>lot</em> of German students go abroad for their graduate degree because they can find better equipment, more funding and more personal attention abroad. Germany has won barely any Nobel Prizes recently. At some point I counted the number of Nobel Prizes that went to affiliates of all German universities combined since 1950 (20-30, I forgot the exact number), and there were several American universities that <em>individually</em> won more prizes than all of Germany in that same time period…</p>

<p>In Germany no one will hold your hand as an undergraduate. If you miss a lecture, you cannot go to office hours and ask the professor to go over the material again. Your professors won’t know you by name and you won’t be playing cards with them on a regular basis. But does no personal relationship with your professors equal a lesser teaching quality? On the graduate level, once you are done taking courses and work on your own project (e.g. a dissertation) a personal relationship with an adviser and funding opportunities are immensely important. On the undergraduate level, when you are working on problem sets and labs? Not so much. Sure, knowing your professors makes college a lot more pleasant, but I am not sure it should be equated with teaching quality.</p>

<p>For me, teaching quality means the quality of the material that is presented by the professor and the way that it is reinforced (i.e. homework). In my experience that has been very similar at my German university and at the two American top colleges I have taken classes at. And I assume that teaching quality measured this way is higher at German universities than at many state universities in the US, just because of selectivity issues.</p>