Delft University of Technology - TU Delft (reviews)

The university is really on the forefront of science. By combining and working together with a variety of disciplines, TU Delft really is a great place for increasing knowledge and a breeding ground for new solutions.

Finding housing in Delft is quite easy, especially compared to in other Dutch cities. DUWO is usually the best option to try or also the university has a special housing program for international students.

The level of the courses taught is very high, higher than at many other universities. Also there are lots of other extra-curricular activities provided so the students gain other, practical experience, such as the Nuna or Ecorunner dreamteams.

I joined TU Delft in August, 2018 so this review is from the point of view of someone who hasn’t been there for long and is from a far away land called, India.
The culture and work ethics at TU Delft can be best described as “open”. Located conveniently in a quiet but not-so-empty city, it’s proximal to all utility stores, a theatre, the city centre and a 15 minute bike ride from most accommodations (in Delft).
The first step is arrival. If you are an incoming student I would highly recommend using the university services for finding a place to live in (you will be charged but it’s worth it; due to the sudden surge in international students in the EU, availability has reduced).
Post arrival, travelling to the campus (or the key pickup location) is really not hard. There was a shuttle service provided by the uni but it was discontinued in our year. Hence, things are pretty dynamic and you should be as flexible as possible.

I’m a Masters student in Biomedical Engineering at 3mE so our work started the day the Introduction Programme (IP) ended. It’s a university where you always have to be on your toes. Prior to starting your classes you make an individual study programme (which might or might not need approval depending on your faculty), so make sure you sit down with your friends and professors and plan a masterpiece (pun intended; not my own sadly).

*Start from Day 0*. This is not a place where you can study one week before the exams and still pass. Grading is a bit stringent but at the same time not really accounted for (since the level is highly standardised) when you apply for internships and projects (there motivation letters and interviews have higher priorities). The subjects are oriented towards the tracks you have chosen but there’s no limit (except for maybe the sky). You can take as many courses in as many faculties as you want (which is the best part about the university *and* it’s not pay-per-credit, so no catch there). The catch is finishing on time. Most international students (non-EU) have an additional burden of graduating within two years since post that you have to still continue paying the fees, and it’s a..lot..comparatively speaking. So when you do take courses, make sure they align with your research interests/maybe even your thesis.

Then come projects. I managed to land a project of interest within two weeks of entering the college. This goes to show how enthusiastic the professors are. They will put you in touch with whoever you need to/want to work with and after that you’ll find yourself applying your courses in the real world (or the lab world).

From a social point of view, the campus is very vibrant. You can join a committee in your student association, a sports team, start your own company, and if you get the time… join a Dream Team (Dutch students usually take a year off to work in a Dream team which reflects the amount of work and time you need to put in). There are plenty activities in the Sports and Culture centre, so you’re covered well and it’s almost never cloudy with a chance of boredom it’s just…cloudy.

All in all, it’s a good university and you will definitely get your money’s worth (almost every student gets a job within three months of graduation), and a bonus point is access to an excellent library that you never really want to leave (they have legos !!!)

Proost!

I’ll start off with a side note: the worst thing is the lack of affordable nutrition. Lots of eating opportunities, but small portions and high prices. Keeping your brain supplied is definitely a necessity at this university.__I study aerospace engineering and i often have the feeling that they purposefully keep us busy and under pressure. I dont know if there is just too much to teach for three years, or whether the aim is to produce resilient workers, but work life balance is of no concern to the university. On the other hand if you want to make time, you can occupy yourself with other things, more on this later. Like most educational institutions, the tu tests competence by quarterly exam periods that revolve around filling out as many old exams as humanly possible. Grinding through these standardized forms is so effective, with respect to passing, that a large part of the student demographic is utterly unconcerned with thorough understanding or actually learning anything. Granted, if time is limited its reasonable to prioritise passing courses. Especially since the pressure of the dutch BSA restriction introduces new students quickly to this methodology. __However, continuous group projects, that encompass about 12h of the timetable per week, actually force students to think for themselves. Also they force to cooperate with others and in general encourage to adopt a professional attitude and mindset towards the coworkers and the job to be done. I think most people, including myself, secretly like them even if they are frequently fairly challenging, since they actually pose an intellectual challenge (as opposed to grinding past papers). Also i have met many interesting, ambitious, creative, inspiring, smart people. Few good friends and a plethora of valuable future connections. Additionally the dream teams offer real engineering work experience early on, so the ambitious truly get the opportunity to learn and grow and develop their skill sets. You just have to want to make an effort. But its questionable if you get far at TU Delft, if you are not willing to bust your ass off. __Additionally the tu offers lots of extra curricular courses, student organizations and societies and sport facilities to encourage the development of versatile personas. Many seminars discuss the change of society and future developments. Faculty bars and public events. Lots of independent projects and generally an international atmosphere. Unfortunately just a lot of men.__To summarize the TU is for sure the cheapest, elite, international and english tought, education facility in Europe.

As a Design for interaction Master student, I believe TU Delft is the place to be.

The Netherlands is so advanced in so many aspects that it feels like the future is already here. TU Delft has a real vision of the future and it prepares you really well for it. I find this really valuable, and this kind of training is really hard to find elsewhere, at least in the field of design. Since it is a domain in transition, many Universities still teach the traditional views on design. TU Delft has a very accurate approach to this, and you feel like you are really close to where everything related to technology is happening.

The design faculty offers three Masters: Design for Interaction (user centered), Strategic Product Design (business oriented), and Integrated Product Design (more technical/engineering). There is a lot of opportunities in the Netherlands for finding a job or internship in these, and TU Delft is very prestigious inside and outside of the country. Furthermore, you also have the opportunity to work on projects for real companies in some of the Master courses, which is a very valuable experience.

Moreover, the TU Delft way of teaching design is learning by doing, and each person has the opportunity to explore their areas of interest. They teach you a mindset that will enable you to tackle any design project with confidence and success. It is also very methodological, and yet there is a lot of freedom for taking a path that fits your interests, as well as many opportunities to develop your professional and personal self. You can shape your Master programme as you like, and also do extracurricular activities such as participating in multidisciplinary projects (Dream teams), joining associations, having student jobs at the University, joining a startup, and more.

On the other hand, Delft is a great student town to live in. Besides being beautiful in every single way, it has a very open minded community who will welcome you and make you feel at home. Here you will find people who share your same passion and come from different backgrounds. There is always something to learn and share with others. I would say a downside can be the weather, since it rains often and there is a little sun in winter time. However, there is much more to discover and appreciate, and in the end a good group of friends and stroopwafels is all you need.

If you have the opportunity of coming to TU Delft, don’t think twice!

Its young students, as well as PhDs, are doing perfectly well and outstanding cutting-edge research. I highly recommend this university for those who want a good research platform and healthy life altogether.

Good school, but not very helpful staff when you have an issue that you need help with (not the professors but the staff). Also the TU Delft websites are very confusing, especially when trying to register for classes. The staff does not even know how to use it and were no help. Campus and location are beautiful and full of culture. A large international student base and very accepting of all cultures.

There’s a lot that TU Delft is lacking, but there are few good things too. From this experience it’s been mainly just seeing the many things that just doesn’t work.
As a Finnish exchange student the experience studywise in TU Delft has been quite bad, especially in the Aerospace Engineering programme. Somehow it feels that there is no knowledge of what is pedagogy, there is no quality criteria for teaching and student satisfactory is ignored.
Where to start. Well in many courses I chose from the AE programme the teaching quality has been really bad. While the professors might be good or okay at lecturing, their assignments, assessment criteria and feedback is poor. They’re completely lost on the amount of work per ECTS and try to cram insane amounts of content to 3 or 4 ECTS courses, where just one topic could make a 5 ECTS course. They’re just trying to outsource their teaching for the student to self study and MEMORIZE huge amounts of information for an exam which don’t measure understanding of the topic, but just pure memorizing of equations and derivations. In the assignments the instructions are many times really unclear or the material you need is not offered by the course, but first you need to spend hours to Google the material you need. Doesn’t really correlate to real work life or follow principles of good pedagogy. When your assignment is graded, many times you get just a number and not a real feedback what went wrong. Feedback can even be in the shape of: “This is wrong.” “It’s your fault you didn’t come to the open office hours.” Open office hours that clash usually with everything else. Especially the student teaching assistants have seem to been the worse and backstab the younger students what they can instead of helping. Professor flex that these were good students last year, but doesn’t correlate their willingness to help.
Also there’s way too many group assignments, which only tells about the willingness to just outsource the teaching for the students instead of actually having quality education. In these cases many times the amount of work is waayyy past the credits of the course. Regarding the study structure and student population one problem with the students is their lack of work experience. They have no idea what kind of time they are given in the industry, so they just lack organizing skills and common sense in group assignments. This is also partially because so many courses rely on blind memorizing and not at applying anything the students become partial robots.
There are some good professors in the Aerospace Engineering department, but in the master’s programme the bad ones really stand up and there’s far too many of them.
Like I said before in the examinations certain lecturers have absurd expectations of what is reasonable to memorize and how much content. Also measuring understanding is pretty much unheard of. Not all, but far too many. Also some have questions that punish for wrong or no answers, which is again pedagogically a horrible method.
I could continue and go into really specifics what is wrong and what is lacking, but I leave this as a warning here for now.
But apart from all bad there’s also some good. But from the other departments. If you’re here I suggest to look into the other departments’ courses too and not get stuck to the one. That helps to understand what is wrong with your programme.
The facilities are really nice and there’s plenty of space for studying. Opening hours of buildings are also rather good. The lack of reasonably priced lunch is just a big minus.
Location of the campus is really good, although the Aerospace Engineering building is a bit far away from everything. Delft is a nice small city and two larger cities The Hague and Rotterdam are closeby.
Student life is medicore at best. The “Introduction Programme” was really nice, found new friends to start the journey in the new university with, but there’s a project at the end of the program, which is really useless. After that the student life is quite non-existent if you don’t know anyone. The student associations are somewhat passive on even informing about anything or trying to get the new students to join them. Plus the people here don’t know how to drink properly and not cause a huge mess afterwards.
For accommodation, avoid DUWO. It’s overpriced and the contract is fixed-period which doesn’t give you any flexibility at all. Plus you have no clue about your roomates before arriving, so you might end up with roomates from hell. But overall the housing is a bit though in the area.
For value I wouldn’t suggest. Eventhough Delft is high in the rankings, the teaching quality is so low that for learning I wouldn’t go for it. I guess it’s so good in research that it thrives in rankings, this just doesn’t show for the students and quality of education.

TU delft is quite an international setup, filled with cutting edge research opportunities and is beautifully located in the serene town of Delft. They university is home to various student associations and organisations. The university study load is quite intense and most students in the university do not experience the entire package as it was meant to be. The course work is not well defined and sometimes the courses don’t add much value to the knowledge gained. The fee for internationals (outside EU) is extremely high and it will keep rising, leaving the international students under great pressure thus not allowing them to focus on other extra curricular activities. Nothing comes free at the university, the fee only includes the bare minimum, all other facilities can be used for a price. The food in the cafe is mediocre and expensive. TU Delft is a good place to study but there is a great room for improvement.