Hey guys,
I was just wondering if there are any German universities that have a great reputation in the US. Just asking since I think my fellow students who don’t know a lot about the American college system wouldn’t be impressed at all if they heard that anyone is studying at Brown/Cornell/Dartmouth/UPenn/UChicago/MIT/… they mostly just know Harvard and Stanford.
Regarding my question, I have heard about TU Munich and Heidelberg in this forum. Do you agree?
To the average American no German universities are “well known”.
Well known to whom?
Most Americans wouldn’t be able to identify a single German university.
If you find this difficult to believe, ask yourself this: what do you think are the best universities in Poland, Brazil or India? Odds are you can’t name a single one. Americans care about as much about German universities as Germans care about Polish universities. Unless you have a specific reason to care, you wouldn’t know anything about them.
German universities do have reputations in specific sub-fields that they are active in. E.g. people working on Apple Maps know of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology because they do a lot of work on routing algorithms - there’s so many KIT alumns at Apple that they have entire teams that work primarily in German.
But if you’re interested in business or medicine or psychology, it doesn’t help you one bit that KIT has a favorable reputation for their theoretical computer science work among a small set of computer science experts.
Or US grad school profs certainly know where the best research is being done abroad.
TUM, Heidelberg, Goettingen, Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet Muenchen, the Free University of Berlin, and others…
I always liked the idea of getting a dueling scar at Heidelberg.
Interesting! I didn’t say that I expected Americans to know German universities as I mentioned that here my friends don’t know anything else than Harvard and Stanford either.
Most Americans wouldn’t know any.
Only grad schools would know what departments are good.
Nope, none came to mind when I saw this thread title. If it was a game show, I’d have to guess “University of…” fill-in-big-German-city-name.
UK, Canada, Australia, and France (because I studied French) are about all I could name. I suspect there’s a University of Tokyo, Moscow University, etc., as with Germany, but I can’t say I “know” them.
Germans have won the most Nobel Prizes in the sciences apart from Americans. So it’s surprising that German universities remain relatively unknown given their contribution to chemistry, physics, medicine, and mathematics.
I worked with a graduate of the Fachhochschule Karlsruhe. And I bet most Americans wouldn’t know what a Fachhochschule is. Or where Karlsruhe is.
Graduate programs would know Fachhochschulen though.
And yes University of + big German city would be a good way to pretend you know German universities.
Roughly speaking, how well that university’s name is known outside the country or outside “circles who know” gives no indication as to how good, selective, or actually well known it is.
Case in point: the Sorbonne v. Louis le Grand.
Or Yonsei v. University of Seoul?
University of Greiswald – had a great- grandfather earn his M.D. degree there 150 years ago! Tops in science/medicine.
@Hamurtle I know where Karlsruhe is, it’s the second or third largest city in Baden-Wurttemberg.