Did I wake up one day in Austria, with no memory of how I got here? No, and I didn’t magically get here, nor did I show up at a random school in Austria. First I had to discover various universities in the countries I was interested in, and then apply to them before their deadlines.
My school search began in the summer of 2023. At that time I knew I wanted to be a master’s student in another country, though I didn’t even know what country. I did have a few ideas however. The countries I was considering included Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and a few others. I wanted to study either computer science, or something very similar such as software engineering. I have a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering,
but found myself more interested in computer programming. I also wanted the peace of mind in knowing that I had a degree that is obviously programming heavy, more so than electrical engineering. I used ChatGPT and internet searches to look for schools. Once I found out about a school, I would visit its website to see what programs it actually has and what the admission requirements are. I used Apple Notes to keep notes about schools, as there was a lot to remember. Within the main Apple Note I used, I categorized the potential universities by country. Although it would be over a year before I left America, I was excited, and knew that I had to pay attention to application deadlines. It would soon be time to start applying,
and I might have to take a standardized test or two before I apply.
I would be taking two standardized tests soon. The first was the TOEFL, an English language exam. Although this wasn’t required by many schools since I had a degree from the U.S., it could help make the application process smoother in some cases, and I thought getting a really high score would make me look good compared to other applicants. The second was the GRE. The GRE can be thought of as the SAT for grad school, even though it is made by a different organization. Besides helping with admissions, I wanted to do well on the GRE because I thought I could have done better on the ACT and SAT back when I was in high school. I didn’t do bad on those, but I could have done better, as I didn’t study as much as I could have. Now I had a shot to study hard. ETS makes both the TOEFL and the GRE. I studied hard for both of those, and am glad I did. The TOEFL was not as easy as I thought. I thought it would be a simple test of whether or not I could speak English, but it was really more of an exam about essay writing, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension. The listening comprehension section would have gotten me by surprise if I hadn’t studied and learned strategies for it. The GRE was tough, but I prepared well for it.
Some schools require letters of recommendation from college professors. Thankfully most of the schools I was most interested in did not. I didn’t have terrible relationships with my professors at Texas Tech, but I certainly could have done a much better job of connecting with them. Thankfully, I did a decent job, and so had a few that I could count on. I reached out to two of them and they both said they’d be willing to write me letters.
I had identified several schools that I was very interested in. The first of these with an approaching application window and deadline was Technische Universität Graz, more commonly referred to as TU Graz. Some of the master’s programs at TU Graz require completing an admission procedure in order to be admitted, which essentially means I would have to apply between October 15th and December 15th, and the number of study places, spots in the program, is limited to 30 new students. All of their master’s programs that I was interested in had an admission procedure. Since my bachelor’s degree is in Electrical Engineering, not Computer Science, and I would be competing for 1 of only 30 spots, I decided to apply for admission to the program named Information and Computer Engineering, which I call Computer Engineering for short. Computer Engineering is a hybrid of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. One thing that particularly appealed to me about this computer engineering program was the fact that it is very elective based, in which I would get to pick my classes from a wide range of subjects. To be exact, there are ten subjects, which can be thought of as categories. They range from Signal Processing to Software Technology. A student picks one of these as a major and one as a minor. Although I didn’t have to decide on a major at that time, I was interested in the Robotics & Intelligent Systems major. TU Graz does not ask for letters of recommendation for admission, but a letter of motivation written by the applicant is required, so it was good to have a specific interest to mention. I was sure to give it my best effort. The letter consisted of an introduction, a paragraph about my interest in the program, a paragraph about my value as a candidate, and a conclusion which includes a thank you. In the interest paragraph I talked about robotics and computer programming, and briefly mentioned a few other subjects. I also said that I am learning German and would like the opportunity to live in a German-speaking country. Additionally I said “Austria in particular is a great country, and I would love to contribute to its technological advancement”. The value as a candidate paragraph consisted of me mentioning some relevant successes I’d had, along with saying that I’d like to research robotics with one TU Graz’s professors. I showed my draft of the letter to my parents, made at least one revision, and then applied.
I considered applying to the Robotics, Process, and Control program at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, though I did not because I though either a computer science or computer engineering degree would have broader appeal with employers, in case I ended up not going down the robotics route, and because ETH Zurich had recommended either scores or percentiles for the GRE, which I did not meet. I did well on the GRE, but ETH Zurich is a very prestigious university and so they have extremely high standards. A third reason was that they required letters of recommendation, which although I knew I could get, I wanted to save asking for those from the two professors for only when I really needed them. I thought that my letters would be wasted in applying at ETH Zurich, since I didn’t have the recommended GRE scores.
Moving on, the second university that I applied to was Hochschule Luzern, which goes by HSLU for short. HSLU is in Lucerne, Switzerland. HSLU and TU Graz were my two favorites, so I was especially sure to apply in time. This time the letter was more about computer science rather than computer engineering, so I talked about web and mobile application development instead of robotics. However, I did mention internet of things, a subject that is similar to robotics. I mentioned Game Shrew, the iOS app I made, in the introduction, which I had done in the TU Graz motivation letter as well. Of course, I talked about Switzerland instead of Austria. HSLU allowed me to submit my TOEFL scores has part of the application, so I did that, wondering if they would be impressed or not. I applied in December of 2023. A professor from HSLU reached out to me. He set up an interview with me via a video call. The interview went well, though during the interview he mentioned that he looked at my LinkedIn profile. In my mind I was like “uh oh”, because I don’t use LinkedIn much and so don’t update my profile often. Apparently nothing on it scared him away, because he seemed interested in me becoming an HSLU student. He then set up a second interview, this time with me and himself again plus another professor. That interview went well too.
The third university I applied to was Università della Svizzera italiana. This school is called USI and is in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Their main campus is in the city Ticino. I initially became interested in USI because it is a Swiss university that accepts GRE scores, though the Artificial Intelligence Specialization of their Informatics program interested me a lot because it includes a robotics course. I wrote the letter of motivation largely be reusing and modifying content from my previous two letters. One big difference was that I broke up the interest paragraph into two paragraphs. The first was largely the same as that of my HSLU letter, though I said it would be cool to learn Italian in Ticino, in place of talking about German of course. I mentioned robotics and data analytics in the second interests paragraph. I also wrote two paragraphs instead of one for the value as a candidate section. The first of those is about future plans so I said I want to become a robotics software engineer, and in the second value as a candidate paragraph I said I would like to work with a professor to research either robotics, machine learning, or computer vision & pattern recognition.
I applied to two other master’s programs. One was the Master of Science in Computer Engineering programme with a specialization in AI, vision, and sound at Aalborg University in Denmark. The other was Master’s degree program in Computer Science at Johannes Kepler University Linz. I wrote letters of motivation for both of those. As usual, I based them off of the ones written for the schools I had previously applied to, making necessary changes. I worked on the JKU letter while I was sort of watching the Super Bowl at my dad’s house. Upon applying however, I found out that JKU Linz doesn’t accept letters of motivation during the application process. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice that beforehand, but whatever.
There were a few other schools that I was thinking about, though at this point I had already applied to all of my favorite schools, and those other schools had deadlines more in the future, so at least for now I was done applying.
I managed to apply to the universities which most interested me before their application deadlines. Prior to this I did a good job studying for and taking both the TOEFL and the GRE. I could now relax a bit, since I was done with application deadlines for now, but I still had to wait to find out if I was admitted, and I had a while before I would actually move to another country to attend one of those universities.