As of now, it is not permitted to hold in-person classes in the winter semester of 2020/21. All events are held online via MS Teams or Zoom. Lab courses and excursions may be exempt from this regulation.

There is no easy answer to this question. We expect that the entire semester will take place online, except for the final semester exams, which are currently planned to be held in person (there might be exceptions, however).

You have to decide for yourself: on the one hand, it is highly useful to be able to interact with your fellow students in person, even if in-person meetings are subject to strict rules and regulations. On the other hand, it may not be the best of situations to experience a possible lockdown in a city you just have moved to.

Please also note that finding suitable accomodation in Aachen is not always easy!

We have no recommendations for a particular laptop or desktop PC. Our computer science courses do not reuire any specific equipment. The operating system of your computer is not important either. In the course "Operating Systems and System Software", for example, programming tasks are carried out using Linux, but the you can run Linux on a virtual machine or use dual boot. We recommend getting a laptop, however, as you can use it to take notes during lectures or make annotations on leture slides. When choosing a laptop, an important criterion is battery life.

Some students use tablets or 2-in-1 convertible laptops for taking notes as an alternative.

In general, feel free to work with the computer and operating system that suit you best.

In the Programming lecture in the first semester, Java, Prolog and Haskell are taught to introduce different types of languages. In the second semester, there will be a short introduction to C, as part of the "Operating Systems and Systems Software" lecture. In the Systems Programming lab course, C will be used. Other languages will be introduced in other courses, depending on the type of problems addressed.

For your curriculum, please visit our Organizational Information web page. During orientation week, student tutors will assist you with creating your timetable. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with our advisors for Bachelor's students.

The math bridge course is a compact four-week course. In this course, you will brush up your skills in school math. You will deepen your knowledge and get a first glimpse of the material tackled in first-semester math lectures.

The one-week computer science bridge course (de) aims to teach you the basics of programming. It is aimed at students with very little or no experience in programming. Please note that the course will be given in German.

In general, we recommend attending the mathe bridge course. If you have no prior (school) experience with programming, we also recommend attending the computer science bridge course. It is also possible to register for both courses; when you attend the computer science course you willl miss just one week of the math course. This way you can take the whole computer science course and a large part of the math course.