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Comment by Jhsto | Hacker News Reader

I recently wrote my bachelors thesis and I wish it could have been as practical as this. Props for German universities for allowing a software engineering project to be accepted. There is no way I could have gotten away with so little amount of academic references.

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When I took my bachelors, each semester we split the 27-ish people in our year into groups of about 6 people that had to write a piece of software related to a theme, e.g. compilers or robots, where the courses that semester supported the theme. At the end of the semester we handed in a report of approximately 100 pages detailing the decisions and design and theory behind the practical work we did, which we had to defend orally.

The bachelor project was more of the same, but each group should do a part of a bigger piece of software. I don't recall having any academic references in our final report.

It was a very nice way to learn, as you had your group members to study with and learn from each other.

This was in Denmark, Aalborg University. Which have just been named the best engineering university in Europe, and the fourth best in the world [0].

[0] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/en...

Hah, I was reading this thinking "That sounds so much like Aalborg". I'm so incredibly happy I went there :)

Here's another report from MIT from earlier this year, reporting largely the same, placing Aalborg at 3rd or 4th depending on the method used [0].

[0] http://neet.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MIT_NEET_Glob...

That sounds so awesome compared to the style of learning I experienced in college. I wish more colleges took a practical approach.

I think that relates to the term "Technical" in the Universities name. In Germany, these Unis are more open to practical stuff, while the general Unis are the ones more focused on theoretical research. Which however doesn't mean exclusivity - both can be found at both.

(I graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of the TUM.)

It's fairly typical to do a software project for a Bachelor's or Master's thesis.

I wrote my bachelors thesis in Germany at a non-TU (Technical University).

A large part of my thesis was implementing a language server for the DOT/Graphviz language [0]. It really depends on the professor.

However, the only thing that matters for the mark is the thesis itself. Many students spend too much time implementing their project and have not enough time for the thesis itself.

[0]: https://edotor.net

Conversely, I got a point deduction on my master thesis for including too many (almost exclusively academic) references. Mental. (They were all relevant.)

I think it depends on the professor. When I wrote my diploma thesis (in Ilmenau), my professor also insisted on academic references and something on the research side. A pure engineering project was not accepted. But it's not super hard to disguise some engineering as research, if it at least contains something new (e.g. the work here does use Rust as a relatively new language).

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