This is important for the test

I haven’t written a single line about the university yet mostly because Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) confuses me a lot.

Officially I am attending 5 classes, effectively I take part in 3 of them. It is hard to make any kind of generalization about the teaching on a sample of 3 classes and the experience can be absolutely different for someone taking other courses not talking about other study fields. As a matter of fact I enjoy that there are no student assistants here and therefore all theoretical and practical classes are held completely by university staff (this is not the case at my university in Graz). I call my triad of lecturers the yelling, the tired and the boring crew. Their English is well understandable, although it is quite clear that they would prefer to hold the classes in Portuguese which they actually do as soon as there are no exchange students in the room.

The hill workout is a part of your university experience

People who are more unwilling to speak English are the students. In the class of the tired professor they stubbornly ask the questions in their native language and after getting the answer in English still ask the follow-up questions in Portuguese by which confuse the poor lecturer a great deal. Another curious thing about students of IST is how they act during the classes. You can often see someone randomly browsing the Internet, hear someone giggling or talking even though the class attendance is not mandatory. Well, they start studying at the age of about 17 and in masters they are probably 20-22 years old. I have an impression that lecturers have to talk their students into doing something at all, during each class you can hear the magic “this is important for the test” used for getting some glimpse of attention.

One of the issues I have to deal with is the punctuality one. If the lecture should start at 12:30 there is a possibility that it would start at 12:32, or at 12:40, or at 13:00. You never really know. There is no way to know when exactly the lecture would end either. At Monday after Easter some professors of my flatmates did not show up to the lecture although it was a working day.

Coming to the lecture on time. True story.

Another source of puzzlement for me are the requirements for the assignments. In all the classes I am taking I am supposed to complete a project in a group of two at some point. In one of the subjects we were told the project should be in Python, one month later it comes out it can be done in any language of our choice. In another class, other way around, first we were announced we could implement our own idea for the project, but after we asked the professor if he is OK with our proposal he had asked us to wait until the list of possible topics is published. There is no reasonable way to plan your workload as the deadlines are somehow quietly
changed from time to time without any official on-line announcements.

The hall of the main building

Fun fact is that by some chance 2/3 of the computer science exchange students are female. It is a long forgotten experience for me to hang out with a group consisting of only girls, as women are highly underrepresented in technological areas in Austria. Most of the exchange students in general are German speaking (cultural shock, huh?).

P.S. The weather is still a sheer madness most of the time. At least after 4 hours of rain you can see a rainbow.

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