Wilkommen in München
Hello and welcome to my blog on my study abroad experience in Munich, Germany!
Here’s a little information about me. I am a third-year computer science student studying at Georgia Tech. I am currently doing an exchange semester at the Technische Universität München (TUM). My high school did not offer any German classes, so I started with German 1001 my first semester at Tech. I took two years of German classes along my normal ones. I did Georgia Tech’s German LBAT (Language for Business and Technology) program this past summer. Then I spent two months living with a host family in rural Bavaria. I moved to Munich about three weeks ago and just finished my first week of classes!
My family was truly my motivation for learning German and coming to Germany. I have an aunt that married a German and lives in Germany with her family. I came to visit them over a summer in high school and fell in love with the country, the language, and the culture. My mother also spent her third year of college abroad in Spain, where she happened to meet my father! My sister did both her Bachelors and Masters in England and lives there now.
My main stressor since moving to Munich, besides trying to meet people and make friends, has definitely been registration for classes. The process is very different here. Whereas at Tech, we register for the next semester’s classes in the middle of the current one, things are done much later here. Registration starts happening about two weeks before the start of the semester. Students are technically free to add/drop classes throughout the entire semester. Most local students register for a lot of classes (there are not caps on most of the classes). They go to the first week(s) of lectures of all of the classes and then start choosing which ones are interesting and of the desired difficulty. The whole thing made me feel rather discombobulated and confused. I told a friend of mine, who is a local German CS major, and he said it was just normal for him for the semester to start this way. That helped me to calm down, knowing that this is just the way things work here.
Unfortunately, most of the classes I applied to have approved for transfer credit back to Tech were accepted as CS elective classes (CS 2XXX or CS4XXX), which does not do me a lot of good in terms of moving towards graduation from Tech with my CS degree. However, this year abroad is about a lot more than taking the next slew of classes at Tech. It is about experiencing life at a different pace, in a different place, meeting new people, improving my German, and figuring out if I could see myself living and working here in the future, which are all rather important things. Education comes in many forms and is not a linear process.
I must say that I underestimated how difficult it would be to take technical CS classes in German. Between the new technical content and the focus required to keep up with the professor’s German, the two-hour lectures are a true exercise in mental concentration. The lectures are fairly similar in style and set-up to the ones at Tech, from what I have experienced so far. Some of the differences I have noticed, however, are that the students tend to be much more respectful here. There’s a lot less unnecessary phone or laptop usage during the class. No one starts packing up until the professor has actually finished the lecture, and all of the students knock on their desks at the end of the lecture (the German education version of applause). From what I have gathered, students spend much less time in lectures and other classes, but they are expected to do a lot more work on their own outside of class.
Doing an exchange semester has been harder so far than I thought it would be. Between all of the paperwork (yes, Germans truly do love their paperwork), mandatory introduction meetings, figuring out where to buy sheets, pots and pans, and cutlery, and getting generally settled in, things can start to feel pretty lonely when you are doing this all on your own. It is a nice way to force some independence and self-sufficiency, however, things become dull quite quickly without friends to share life with! The CS department at TUM has their own mentoring program for exchange Bachelors and Masters students called the Minga Mentoring Program (I just learned yesterday that Minga is a colloquial term for Munich!). I have met a bunch of other international students through the events of the program and am becoming friends with my own mentor! I am living in the Studenten Stadt (StuSta), a city block full of large dorm-like buildings in Munich, and have met a lot of other students, including many international ones, at the few events I have been to. The overall student culture of the StuSta is very welcoming and friendly. I am also fortunate to have a friend who was born and raised here and studies at the other main university in the city, Ludwig Maximilian Universität. He has been a great resource for my many questions and also for introducing me to lots of other lovely people.
German friendships are like really good insulators. They take a while to warm up to you, but once they do, they are very loyal and close. I have remembered to keep this in mind when I meet other locals, as they often do not seem super friendly when I first meet them, but by the second or third time I see them, they are eager to stop and chat.
In general though, these first three weeks have been a proper challenge, but also rewarding. I am rapidly coming to love Munich and TUM. Despite not having been in Atlanta since May, I do not feel homesick, because home is where the heart is, and this city has mine. I keep thinking to myself that if/when I get my master’s, I would really like to do it here. There’s a lot of time between now and then, but I am taking it as a very good sign that I am already ready to sign up for more time here in Bavaria.
