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Teaching

[ fit for industry & science | course list | administrative issues: makeup policy, etc. | contact and office hours | links | teaching statement | finally: fun ]

Making Students Fit for Industry & Science

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 2007 CHE ranking evaluates Jacobs University 2nd across Germany in the categories "study conditions", "lab equipment", and "mentoring and supervision" (see also press release).

Likewise, industry repeatedly has confirmed that Jacobs University is well on track and Jacobs University students convey key success factors:

  • "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:

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

Course List

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

Administrative Issues

  • makeup (retake) of exams:
    In cases where a makeup applies students must take action immediately - that is: within one week - when they return to campus by contacting me so that we can fix a date for the makeup. Once a week has passed without contacting me, no makeup will be possible.
    Please note that the retake, as a rule, will be significantly more demanding than the original exam to make up for the extra preparation time the examinee has.

  • 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

Feel free to come to my office located in Research I, room 88 (1st floor), best by arranging for an appointment by email in advance.

  • email:
  • voice: +49-421-200-3178

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 © 2004-2009 Peter Baumann -- -- tel. +49-173-583 7882 -- Disclaimer