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A big "thank you" to students and co-faculty alike for electing me Teacher of the Year 2020! This honour will be my inspiration to work even harder for creating an effective learning atmosphere that make stundents understand today's complex CS and IT better, and carry home actionable insights and skills.
And let's never forget to add a fun factor.

Teaching

[ fit for industry & science | course list and thesis topics | administrativa like office hours | links | teaching statement | finally: fun ]

Making Students Fit for Industry & Science

U-Multirank 2018 score of Jacobs (source):
CHE ranking 2018 of Jacobs CS (source):
CHE ranking 2015 of Jacobs CS (source):

[You may find it funny hat "international orientation" is considered low; CHE counts figures like "obligatory stays abroad from Germany" which does not exactly match with the Jacobs setup.]

Jacobs University continuously strives to offer highest quality standards in student education. In the field of Computer Science, our goal is to enable students to become successful IT professionals, be it in an industry or in an academic career.

THE Ranking 2021: Jacobs University best international university in Germany. One of the world’s most renowned university rankings has again impressively confirmed the high quality of research and teaching at Jacobs University. In the World University Ranking 2021 of the British magazine "Times Higher Education" (THE), Jacobs University was placed among the 300 best universities. In terms of international orientation, it was ranked first place among German universities. More than 1,500 universities worldwide are represented in the THE Ranking this year.

Consistently high rankings in umultirank:

  • In the 2019 international U-Multirank university ranking, the private university in Bremen, Germany, received the best ratings, together with the Otto Beisheim School of Management. In terms of international orientation of its study programs, Jacobs University ranks among the 25 best universities in the world. See details.
  • In 2018, CHE Ranking of Die Zeit determined a top position for Jacobs Computer Science based on on-time graduation, third-party funding, and international orientation. Also, umultirank scores Jacobs U top (see box).
  • In 2017, the worldwide assessment by umultirank revealed that: Computer Science at Jacobs University ranks first among all German Computer Science universities that participated (both for _all_ metrics and for the default setting - local copy); With all metrics selected, CS is ranked 3rd in the European Union (with default metrics 2nd I think).

In the CHE rankings of Die Zeit, Jacobs University Computer Science always secures top places - in 2015 it scored #3 Germany wide (see screenshot). In some detail: First position in teachers and support by teachers, courses offered, and research orientation plus a second position in contact to students, support during initial phase of studies, study organization and overall study situation. First position (together with another university) in support for stays abroad and second position in job market preparation. Seventh position Germany-wide in third party funds per academic. Frankfurter Allgemeine lists Jacobs under the headline "Wo studiert es sich besonders gut?". German portal meineuni.de reports in Die Welt ("Diese Unis machen richtig Spass"): "Auffällig ist, dass im Gesamtranking auf meineuni.de die ersten sechs Plätze ausschließich von privaten Hochschulen belegt werden. In dieses fließt neben den Wohlfühlfaktoren und dem Service auch die Bewertung der Lehre durch die Studenten ein. Auf Platz Nummer eins schafft es, vor allem wegen der dort gelebten Internationalität, die Jacobs University Bremen."

Likewise, industry repeatedly has confirmed the high quality of Jacobs CS education and that Jacobs students bring along key success factors. See what students think and how industry appreciates Jacobs graduates - or just read on:

  • November 2024: "The knowledge I received in my "Software Engineering" course proved invaluable [...] the course gave me both theoretical grounds and practical knowledge how to be successful outside of the class."
  • On 2015-03-26, Microsoft has awarded several stipends to Jacobs University Computer Science students. At that same day, 4 students from CS graduating Class 2015 signed their working contracts with Microsoft for starting right after graduation; additional students pending. Just for comparison: The second largest talent pool of CS graduates in Germany for Microsoft is TU Munich where they hired 2 people - although TUM is 20x Jacobs in CS and a top-rank German public university. Says Britt Allen, Microsoft University Recruiting team at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, US: "We think Jacobs University students have a very high standard of education and regularly impress us with their creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and transdisciplinary thinking."
  • Jacobs alumnus Ankur Modi has successfully launched a startup on security - see his video.
  • "I am just in the final stages of my internship at Airbus Hamburg where I developed an online tool to manage the milestones involved in the manufacture of their aircrafts. I was amazed by the fact that I had to use so much of the knowledge I gained from the software engineering course. I would just like to thank you as my professors for preparing me for the real industrial environment out there."
    -- Amos Rweyemamu Mushumbusi, September 2013
  • "The courses I took with you, especially the Databases and Web Applications, not only did I enjoy greatly, but also have helped me a lot academically and professionally. The project I did in the DBWA course for example, served a much bigger purpose than the course itself. It was used as a real application in the Campus Radio at that time and, professionally, it was the first real-world step towards what I do today as a Software Engineer in a leading e-commerce company in Germany."
    -- Adriatik Bedjeti, May 2013
  • In September 2012, Jacobs CS undergrads Stefan Mirea (Romania) and Dominik Kundel (Germany) won the Facebook developer contest over 300 participants.
  • India has quickly propelled me up the company ladder, and currently I have a team of about 7 people and I'm leading an R&D project that involves creating India's first autonomous vehicle capable of navigation on roads (something like the Google Autonomous car). -- Rares Ambrus, Class of 2008
  • "After acquiring very good experience with interns from Jacobs University in the past years, some of whom now hold full time positions with us, we would again like to offer the opportunity to attend a summer internship at CleverSoft in Munich this year."
    --Marcel Hockauf, Operations Manager, CleverSoft GmbH Munich, Germany
  • "In February 2009 Andrei Ionita joined lat/lon GmbH, a small enterprise specialized on Spatial Data Infrastructure and Geo-Information Systems. Andrei joined our team of software developers and contributed substantially to our core product, the Open Source Java framework deegree. He successfully took on the responsibility of writing SOAP webservices for one of our Research and Development projects and became the maintainer of one of our core components, the Sensor Observation Service (SOS). His skills in software engineering - especiall object oriented technologies and Java programming - are an asset for our company. I believe his university-acquired knowledge was decisive in quickly adapting to our very dynamic Java project framework."
    -- Dr. Christian Kiehle, lat/lon GmbH Bonn, Germany, September 2010
  • "On behalf of CleverSoft GmbH I would like to express our complete satisfaction with the Jacobs University students, who did internships with us in the summer of 2009."
    -- Ivan Stefanov, software developer and Jacobs alumnus, CleverSoft GmbH Munich, Germany
  • "Dimitar demonstrated to understand perfectly the company strategy and development methodologies. The speed of learning was really surprising, and he was able to become productive in a very short time. He demonstrated very good planning capabilities and initiative attitude that allowed me to coordinate his jobs in a very efficient way and to delegate to him tasks without a strong supervision.
    We strongly encourage extreme programming in our development department, thus Dimitar was always working on the tasks together with another developer from our integration point team, as well as with developers from the other teams. The implmenting code was always clean and well documented, and included unit and regression tests for automated testing of the implemented functionality."
    -- Denis De Rossi, Engineering Department, Finantix, Venice, Italy, about the internship of Dimitar Misev in summer 2008
  • "...during the interviews and tests I realized how important were the SE courses i took with you. They asked about software life cycle, the different programming models (incremental, waterfall, etc) the use of UML diagrams and the different types of relationships for database design and of course all sort of crazy queries in SQL. So the topics covered in our lesons were a fundamental part to get the job and they were rather impressed by the broad amount of topics covered in the courses."
    -- Daniel Alonso Garcia, class of 2008, about his new employment Iteratec
  • "Also, I wanted to thank you for using XP (eXtreme Programming) in Software Engineering Lab. My boss was telling me that the company practices XP, and when I told him we did something like that in school he was really impressed. They use Subversion for source code control, and I had seen it too in SE course. I recently read a book 'The Pragmatic Programmer': great book I have to admit. It describes the qualities of a good programmer, and I think the courses in software engineering helped me become one."
    -- Saksham Gautam, class of 2007, about his new employment
  • In summer 2007, five Jacobs University CS students have been invited to internships at Google after undergoing a highly competitive selection process by Google. This is an unrivalled percentage among universities.
  • In March 2007, a group of Jacobs University CS students managed to attract the TopCoder contest to Jacobs University.
    (US-based TopCoder carries out programming contests both online and on location. The TopCoder Collegiate Tour, of which the Jacobs University event is part of, started in the US in 2006 and reached Europe in spring 2007.)
  • In January 2006, an EECS grad student did an internship with ASML in the field of cleanroom circuit design and immersion systems.
    "Ivan started Tuesday 10th of January and he is starting up very quickly. In these two weeks he already joined some people to the cleanroom for experiments (partly doing experiments himself), is finding his own way in the company (people, procedures,...) and learning the focus technology (especially focus setup for immersion systems) very quickly. I am very pleased by his approach of working here, he is adapting very good!"
    -- Marc Boonman, ASML, The Netherlands
  • In summer 2005, two EECS undergrad/grad students did an internship with EADS on complex geo information services.
    "The students' effort here was excellent and I truly believe that they are an asset in the software engineering field."
    -- Juergen Jonas, Head of Software Engineering, EADS Deutschland GmbH, Friedrichshafen, Germany
  • An EECS student in 2005 applied for an internship at Freescale Semiconductors and won over all other applicants.
    "I noticed that students at IUB receive a good and thorough education in the field of Computer Science, getting to know tools and methods that will help them in producing quality software."
    -- Nicusor Penisoara, Software Engineer, WMSG division, Freescale Semiconductors, Germany
  • An EECS student of 2004 applied as engineer with Procter & Gamble and was hired as a manager.
    "The international live-in campus concept of IUB is addressing exactly our need to find talent, that can succeed in the global marketplace. All of our engineers are part of global, cross-functional teams. While technical mastery is still key as a basis for success as an engineer, cultural competence as well an appreciation of the challenges in this world outside Europe and North-America, are critical to bring those skills to good use. The concept used by IUB enables its students to combine studying for their degree with effective learning about other people and cultures - and all that in English, the dominating international business language."
    -- Bernhard Weber, Associate Director, Procter & Gamble (Head of Euskirchen plant)

Some places to look for internships and jobs:

  • praktika and locanto for German student internships,
  • dbjobs, a database of database jobs, and
  • dbgrads, a database of graduating database students.

None of these offers are endorsed in any way by me nor Jacobs University.

Course List

Access to course material is restricted to Jacobs University.
For any course, make sure you have read the administrativa!

Administrativa

  • reassessment of exams I do not offer.
  • makeup (retake) of exams: according to general Jacobs regulations.
  • mailing list communication: Note that I do not use the Campusweb course fora, instead there are dedicated mailing lists per course. Make sure you subscribe to these lists right in the beginning of the course to not miss important communication!

Contact and Office Hours

Feel free to contact me by email any time. Office hours are Monday 16:00 - 17:00 CET, Research I, room 88 (1st floor) for physical meetings; send me an email in advance, too.

  • email:
  • voice: +49-421-200-3178 (forwarded to my mobile, takes a few seconds)

Teaching Assistants

For your convenience, I have prepared a list of actions and deadlines to ensure smooth collaboration.

Related Links

Finally: Fun

I'm starting a collection of CS/IT jokes here; feel free to contribute! If you feel offended, don't read it.

Copyright © 2004+ Peter Baumann -- -- tel. +49-173-583 7882 -- Disclaimer