UPB is considered to be the best university for engineers in Romania,and it is also the largest. It has faculties that cover all domains, from aerospatial engineering to computer science and mechatronics.

Our university provides a good background for studies in the tech field. I finished my Bachelor’s at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science. During the 4 years of studying, I went through courses on different topics, focusing on the engineering part because of the track that I chose (lots of Mathematics, Numerical methods and optimizations, Signal processing, Physics for control and prediction of processes), but also covered a good knowledge base on the Computer Science side (such as programming languages, databases, computer architecture, algorithms and software design). From the point of view of experience provided by the university, my favorite course was one which had a modern laboratory where we programmed 4-DoF/6-DoF (degrees of freedom) SCARAs (Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arms). All in all, I am content with the amount of knowledge that was covered during these years, even though, in some cases (20%), I received even more than expected on the engineering side, but less than expected on the computer science side.

One detail which I see as very important is that comparing this to different friends’ university experiences (England, The Netherlands, France etc.) it offers a different perspective. Lots of our students are disappointed with the amount of involvement from some of our professors on a day to day basis, but, from my point of view, those are the “regular university professors” and we were lucky to have other professors involved much more than that. Our students have this opinion because they usually expect all of the content to be exposed during lectures/tutorials (hence requiring a very low additional effort to pass the exams). However, I am happy because I see the university years as a time when I was mainly supposed to study on my own and, even with that in mind, most of our professors delivered more than I was expecting to receive and I rarely had to actively read additional materials which were not presented during lectures/tutorials, plus they were usually small in size (3-4 pages per week).

The university life was also interesting because I had the opportunity to grow, aside from the main university activities. I found EESTEC, an international student association focused on the growth of tech students. EESTEC has local groups of students in various cities and the Bucharest’s group is hosted by our university. I joined this group as a volunteering activity, I had the chance to contribute to organizing events for students to help them grow (workshops on tech skills or soft skills, hackathons), I grew my management and communication skills with these activities, but we also created some amazing friendships in Bucharest and got to travel around Europe to meet students from different tech universities with different backgrounds.

Out of all these 4 years, I can say that the part that I enjoyed the most was connecting with so many wonderful people and sharing thoughts, knowledge and interests in the tech area, but also our culture with each other, so I am glad for being there in a place that made this possible.