The Berlin Institute of Technology (Part I)

It's where I study. At least, for the next 3 months or so. Specifically, it is clustered around Ernst-Reuter Platz in the western part of Berlin, but there could be other satellite locations of which I am not aware.
Anyway, I just want to discuss a few aspects of it to start off with. First of all, it is huge. Something on the order of 35,000 students study here, which is almost 3 times as large as what I'm used to at Duke (and half of those are grad students in the US, so we never see them anyway). I have class in a lecture hall here that could seat upwards of 1,000! But even so, I've only seen it filled once, and that was for a Colloquium from a Nobel Prize winner(I think he won the Nobel Prize). It is so enormous that it is visible from Google Earth (52º35'40.08" N, 13º19'39.47" E) And one of the things I found a little strange (but understandable, in light of the size of the university) is that you don't have to register for most of the classes taken here. Instead, you just show up on the first day. If there is an associated tutorial or recitation, you are expected to register for those, depending on whether or not the space is limited in them. For example, with my Signals and Systems course, aside from my registration for the online content, the professor/administrators would have no idea whether or not I were in the course. And when you compare this with registration at Duke, where it sometimes feels impossible to get the class you want, it's just kind of incredible to be able to theoretically take whatever. You do have to register for the final test as well, but I believe that it's possible to do so without being in the course.

Then again, this system does have its drawbacks, namely impersonal relations between lecturers and students. Because much of the information is available elsewhere (lecture slides online, review of important problems in recitations, textbooks etc.), many students will simply not attend classes in which the lecturer is particularly uninteresting. I can also imagine there being very little sympathy on the part of the instructor for those students whose grades are particularly borderline.

Word for the Post: die Studierende
Pronunciation: Stu-DEER-in-duh
Translation: literally, 'Studying', not in the sense of the gerund as in English, but rather as a noun. Refers primarily to university students, but also broaches an interesting facet of the German language which has recently come up for debate. More on that in the next post!