Student review [#21954] for Aerospace Engineering
at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - UPC

I studied for one full year in the UPC as part of a Sicue mobility program. Overall my experience was good. I had a bunch of good professors who enjoyed their job and put a big effort into their classes. Contrary to other universities the content of the exams was similar to what was explained during the lessons so you just need to work on the class materials and if you work a bit you will pass without a problem.
However, if you decide to come to this university you need to check carefully the teaching program in order to know in what language classes will be taught. In most of the subjects, the teaching program says “Catalan or Spanish” which means that by default professors will start giving the class in Catalan. If you are a foreign student once you explain your situation to the professor most likely he will change to Spanish, however, there are always exceptions and some of them will ask you to learn Catalan (in my case there were only 2). In that the teaching program set that the subject is taught in English you should not have any problem. However, what I have told up to this point is only applicable to students in a mobility program. If you are a new student planning to make the full bachelor’s there (from the 1st year) they will ask you to learn Catalan because even the subjects that are defined as “Catalan or Spanish” will be taught only in Catalan.

Besides that, I also think that the subject could be more practical since they are very theoretical. However, I think this is a general problem of Spanish universities.
Regarding the location. The UPC has lots of campuses distributed through several villages around Barcelona. All of them are well connected to Barcelona, thus you can go every weekend to hang out there. Nonetheless, I recommend renting an apartment close to the campus because trying to go every day from Barcelona to Terrassa, Castelldefels..etc is costly in terms of money and time.
Of course, Barcelona is a great city, you can easily find plenty of cultural plans almost every day. I think that the only backward it has is that since it is all the time full of tourists, this is the most expensive city in Spain. Thus having a beer in a bar or going to restaurants have an average prize more similar to the center of Europe than to Spain.