Nick P.
Google
I did a Master's degree in computer science at LMU. The course generally gave me a lot of freedom to choose the right path and find an area in which I wanted to deepen my knowledge. In some courses there were also very good links with local industry and research opportunities on projects in robotics, machine learning and quantum computing. In addition, some courses were also taught by external lecturers with close links to industry. The selected external guest lecturers were very helpful and offered to stay in touch for questions after their time at LMU.
In addition, students have the opportunity to choose not only from all the academical programs available at LMU, but also to select courses in collaborations or courses taught solely at TUM. Further there are exciting extra curricular activities between the universities such as Manage and More, CDTM or TUM.ai. Due to the high demand I personally feel such cooperations could be further expanded to make more use of synergies between the diverse talent at the different universities in this region.
Allover I had very good lecturers at LMU, who were very knowledgeable, friendly and committed. I specifically enjoyed the areas of Quantum Computing, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning and High Performance and Parallel Computing. Some of the teaching staff had also been co authors at quite prestigious papers. Generally I have to say that in my experience, the staff for labs/tutorials and support staff were always very friendly and helpful towards students. Also notably, most of my courses were taught in English only.
The campus and the facilities are very beautiful and the main buildings are located in the middle of the city with excellent connections.
On the other hand, I however also agree with some critics that LMU is unfortunately slow to digitise itself. Online course offers are rare and often stem from times of the pandemic. Which is a pity at best. Also the website as landing page is confusing and a lot of information, e.g. on subjects, is not centralized or may be even out of date. Offers such as those provided by TUM with Artemis for individual, digital learning would also be wonderfully suitable for LMU. It is a pity that such tools are not shared. Also student life is not as good as in other cities as it is actually relatively difficult to get to know other students and the subject content is often very academic and less practically oriented. However, I had already heard the same criticism and pain points from TUM students which also stated that their courses are quite theoretical and „Praktika“ are hard to get. Perhaps it is simply the German system that is not market-oriented like the USA, Australia or UK. This demand from industry for practically and theoretically Verse students is somewhat counteracted by LMU through an introduction of a range of "Praktika" on offer. However, only a very small number of these can be taken in total. And then again it may be even hard to receive a spot. Especially since a new system, which isn’t based on individual applications anymore, has been introduced. On the other side the structure of a university offers the flexibility to take on a research project, an internship in the industry or even a part time work study job (if one can joggle the load) to fill in some practical knowledge.