Swiss vs. Czech university

I had a great opportunity to study a year abroad during my master degree studies. In this article I would like to describe differences between my home university at Brno, Czech Republic and my hosting university at Lugano, Switzerland. 

First of all, I study computer science. This is quite a novel academic discipline when compared to others. Philosophy, medicine and other human and social sciences are as old as humankind itself. Most of natural sciences such as chemistry, physics an so on existed from early ages but significantly advanced with the industrial revolution in 18th century. It enabled scientist use new technologies which led to more sophisticated and complex experiments and revealed the secrets on nano world as well as distant galaxies.  The roots of the computer science dates back to 1694 (Leibnitz`s calculator) but the computers as we know them today first appeared in 1940s. So one would expect that the academic curriculum of such novel discipline would not differ so much amongst different universities. But is this really true?

Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology

In Brno there are two huge lecture room. The main lecture room has capacity of 300 people and the lectures are streamed in real time to two smaller rooms of capacity 150 and 90 people. The second lecture room has capacity of 150 with live stream to two rooms of capacity 70 people. So you can imagine that there is no personal contact with the lecturer - during the lecture you are lost in the mass of the people or you can be even in the different room as the lecturer himself. There are also exercises classes related to the lectures with about 30 students each but this exercises are led by the teaching assistants, not the lecturer himself. 

During the semester there is quite a high number of programming projects (either there is bigger amount of smaller ones or few of the big team projects). Average students have big difficulties following the lectures and dealing with the programming so they either follow the lectures and do the minimum of projects or vice versa.

On the lectures the huge amount of information is presented and very wide area of computer science is covered. The lectures takes place one a week and it is usually three hours lecture. This is very tiresome and exhaustive, especially when you have two consecutive lecture blocks. But the lectures are streamed online so you can even watch them from home or download the video from the lecture and watch it later and multiple times when the subject is still unclear. But this video streaming was abused by the huge number of students who watched all the lectures just before the exam at the high speed so the streams have been reduced recently, not all subject have them available.

The university education in Czech is free of charge. The Brno University of Technology has big capacity of dormitory and the school also pays students housing scholarship. So from the financial point of the view university does it very easy for students.

Universita della Svizzera italiana, Faculty of Informatics

The first and the most obvious difference I noticed is the amount of students at lectures. The lectures are visited by approximately 30 students so the lecturer knows your name and the lectures are very interactive (professors asks lot of questions). The lectures are organized in two 1.5 hour blocks (so the lecture takes place twice a week) and the amount of data covered on the subject is not as huge as in Brno. At the beginning of the lectures there is usually short recap from the last lecture. The offered subjects deal with the computation theory, algorithms, SW design and so on. It does not contain any hardware subjects nor theory of underlying electronics signals.

The number and complexity of programming assignments is not as high as in Brno. Professors are interested more in program results and their interpretation than the code itself. You usually have free choice of programming language.

Each student of informatics gets MacBook Pro from university and if he graduates he can keep it. University also organizes some trips and cultural events for new students (barbecue, aperitifs, museum visit, town excursion, ...). There is also career service which helps students to consult future career and internships. But all this luxury is not for free. Domestic Swiss students pays 2000CHF tuition fee per semester. For foreign students this fee is doubled.
USI is also an international university, students from all around the world study here. You can meet people from USA, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Germany, Sweden, Romania, Macedonia, Spain, Italy and lot more. This is great opportunity to prepare for working in multicultural environment which big IT companies like Google and Facebook definitely are.

Conclusion 

From my point of view, the swiss university tries to form their students to specialists in specific areas of computer science. They cover narrow spectrum of the computer science but in more detail. They also try to encourage practical experience in form of internships at different companies.

The absolvent of Brno University of technology is full of theoretical knowledge and has overview of very wide spectrum of computer science. If the student was active he found some internships by himself and he is ready to work in commercial sphere. What do you think, which approach is better?