Student review [#9507] for Aerospace Engineering
at Delft University of Technology - TU Delft

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.