Since September 30 I’m enrolled in IT-Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. First week: programming, maths, modelling. New city, new people.
HPI takes 80 students a year into the bachelor’s. Selection isn’t just your school grade. There’s a motivation letter and an aptitude test too. With a 1.4 Abitur (German scale, 1.0 is the best) I wasn’t sure the grade alone would have been enough. What probably helped was everything before it: Jugend forscht up to the national final, two first prizes in the first round of the German Federal Computer Science Competition, and a team win in the computer science competition of the specialist schools.
I already knew the campus. In January I came here for a weekend camp that prepares students for that computer science competition: dynamic programming, team tasks, presentations. That was my first real contact with HPI.
I also had offers from bigger universities, among them TU Munich, KIT and RWTH Aachen. I still went with Potsdam. The reason is simple. I wanted a small place again, with real competition but also a lot of exchange between people. That’s what my specialist school in Erfurt was like, and it did more for me than any single grade.
Whether HPI works the same way, I obviously can’t tell after one week. I’ll find out over the next few semesters.