Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich (reviews)

Grew up in Zurich and attended ETH in mechanical engineering.

Going abroad for an exchange made me realize how good ETH is. Low assignment workload and pure focus on theory in the first years means the theoretical depth and thoroughness with which it is tested makes this a great education. The student engineering projects that we were able to participate in were world-class. ETH also has a great low-bureacracy culture. The amount of lectures held on cutting edge topics by world-class professors is amazing. And: In their last few years, students have the opportunity to participate in internationally competitive research.

With some exceptions, the students I took classes with during my exchange in North America did not seem nearly as consistenly competent as my peers at ETH.

However, ETH has a few areas where there is definitely room for improvement:

– Male-dominated in many fields, both in the student body and among professors. This definitely must be improved.
– Generally, ETH is not nearly as diverse as other unis (e.g. MIT), which means there’s less diversity of thought and a less creative culture.
– Ethics and scientist’s/engineer’s role in society are almost never discussed at ETH.

Good infastructre, great teaching courses good ways to add more courses. Each category is demanding but it also helps the help learn more and there are courses that benefit from that. Lifelong friends made.

ETH is an incredibly supportive and educational place when you want to do research. I would encourage any student to do their PhD at ETH. But considering the fact that ETH is rated as one of the best schools, (or even number one in my domain) the teaching is very bad. Students are mostly expected to guess what are the requirements and to study these individually because often the lectures and the materials are incomprehensible and a chaos. It feels like the best researchers become professors even though they have no qualifications for teaching.

Generally great university, but infrastructure is reaching it’s capacity in many areas, which is further promoted by forcing students to visit the lectures in person by abandoning livestreams for many courses.