On these pages we provide information on several academic and organizational aspects of your stay at RWTH Aachen University, for example how you can search for courses, and how you can register for your courses and the corresponding exams.
Please note that our pages are only for exchange students, international applicants for a regular Master program at RWTH Aachen University should contact the Computer Science student counselling (“Fachstudienberatung” or “Fachstudienberater”).
The information given on this page is thought for exchange students who already arrived at RWTH Aachen University. It is a short version of what we demonstrate during the introductory meeting. If you need advises, please contact us (by e-mail) so that we can try to selve problems by e-mail or if necessary arrage a (Zoom) meeting.
You can search for courses with RWTHonline. A general introduction to RWTHonline is available here. Information on how to search and filter for courses is given on the subpage Selecting Courses. When browsing course lists, you wil notice that most courses have assigned an information like “LE | 3 SWS”. You can ignore the “3 SWS”. It is a German-specific measure for course load and means “three presence hours per week”. More interesting is the “LE” or other characters. The meaning is:
Mostly, you will attend regular coursework - that is lecture together with exercises. Often you wil find one “LE” entry in RWTHonline for such coursework. Sometimes you will find two entries, one L and one E. Don’t care about that – due to organizational reasons (mostly for time planning) two entries have been created by the teachers; but nevertheless both beong to the same class and you have to attend both. A small number of classes in addition offers exercise groups. But mostly this is done for the basic Bachelor courses which are taught in German.
In some cases you might participate in a seminar (writing a research paper, giving a presentation) or a lab/practical (larger programming projects). But, places in these types of courses have already been assigned in early February. You might contact the teachers to ask if there is room in a seminar or lab, but probably chances to join such a course in April are rather low.
To get an overview about all classes, you might have a look to short presentations of all our elecives on https://sc.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/en/wahlpflicht/.
You can also browse courses from other faculties/departments. For many courses, there are no limitations so that you can also attend them. If you have doubts on this, please contact me.
Have a look here for information how to register for courses. Most courses you can register via RWTHonline. If there is no registration procedure for a course available, this might have two reasons:
Sometimes a registration is available, but you cannot register. In this case the teachers have configured the registration only for certain student groups, so that exchange students cannot use them. In this case pease contact the teachers - tell them that you are an exchange student and cannot use the registration procedure, and ask them for manual registration.
The effect of a course registration is that you are booked into the Moodle room for this class. you now have access to all learning materials. We recommend that you register for all courses which might be interesting for you. So you can get an impreession of several courses and finally can decide after some weeks which courses you really want to take.
For most courses you can register till July - but don’t take this for sure! Teachers might configure their registrations differently. So have a close look at the registration interval to not miss it.
You can register for as many classes as you like - the effect is that you get access to all learing materials and can participate in a course. But, you have to register a second time - if you want to attend the examination of a course, you have to do a second registration for the corresponding exam. Have a look to the RWTHonline documentation to get an intoduction how to register for exams.
Important: only the courses for which you register an exam, later on will appear on your Transcript of Records. You don’t need to care about all your course registrations, but think about which courses you want to register an exam for.
Deadline for exam registeration usually is January 15 in winter semester and June 30 in summer semester. But as above: don’t take this for sure! Have a close look to registration deadlines of all exams you are interested in, and try to register early.
If you are interested in registering exams of other faculties/departments, please contact me - some faculties have extra procedures for registration.
Note that for most classes two examination dates are offered. In case you miss or fail the first examination, you can take the second one. But you have to register for this second exam date again with RWTHonline! Deadline for doing so is seven days before the second exam date.
In case you decide to not attend an exam, please deregister from it. You can do so till three work days before an exam date.
Note that teachers might decide on exam admission criteria! They might decide that you have to solve exercieses during the semester, participate in a midterm exam or work on e-tests during the semster to get permission to atted the exam. Please attend the first lecture or have a close look to the material of the first lecture date - teachers will inform you in the first lectrue on how to get exam admission.
In case an exam date here at RWTH Aachen is too late for you, please contact the teachers early. Maybe they can offer you a special, earlier examination date. Or they might agree to a distance exam so that you could write the exam after being back at your home university. But, the teachers always have to agree, so please contact them early.
You are not bound to the coures you initially wrote in your learning agreement. You are free to change your whole set of courses. Only make sure with your home university that your changes are accepted.
We recommend that you register for all interesting courses in the beginning of the semester. After a few weeks decide which courses you really want to take, and only for these courses register the exam. Please then adapt your learning agreement. Just send me a scan for signature, or make an appointment to get a signature.
At the end of your stay you receive a Trancript of Records contaning your results in all courses you registered exams for. We can read out your results from RWTHonline and will notify you when all results are available and we can print your transcript.
Note that courses from our language center are not integrated in RWTHonline! We do not receive any results from language center. If you participated in a language course and want to get it listed on your Transcript of Records, please send us your results as soon as possible. You get a certificate from language center - sending us a scan is enough.
In the exam registration sheet which we will send to you, please list language courses so that we know that we can expect some results outside from RWTHonline later on. The same holds if you participate in any other course in which you do not need to register an exam. Include them in the registration sheet so that we know about all results that we need to consider when printing your transcript.
When your trancript is ready, you get a notification from us. If you are still in Aachen, you could visit us to get it; otherwise please give us a postal adress to which we can send it.
When finishing your stay at RWTH Aachen University, you get your trancript from us. If you need a certification on your stay duration (most universities demand their students to hand in such a certification), please contact International Office. They are issuing this kind of certification.
Remember to cancel your rental agreement, bank account, cell phone contract, et cetera on time.
You also have to terminate your enrollment at RWTH Aachen University.
In case of any questions, contact us.
Responsible for all of administrative aspects of your time at RWTH Aachen is our International Office. Note that the Exchange Student Advisory Service of the Department of Computer Science is only responsible for the academic aspects of your stay here.
The International Office web pages offer a lot of useful information for your stay at RWTH Aachen, for example information on the application process, on how to plan your stay and tips about housing.
If you need any help or have questions left on these topics, you can contact the International Office here.
The Exchange Student Advisory Service helps you to organize the academic part of your stay. We might advise you in case you think about applying at RWTH Aachen University, and we can assist you in setting up a learning agreement. During your stay in Aachen we will be available to help you with all questions regarding your studies.
Basically, there are two systems at your disposal all the time: RWTHonline offers you an overview on courses, including descriptions, schedules and exam dates. you have to use the tool to register for courses. The second system is RWTHmoodle which is a learning room platform and is used to organize most courses. With this system you get access to learning materials, e-mail lists etc.
Because the systems are hard to use, especially if you are not speaking German, our web pages support you in using them. For information on how to plan your courses, see section Selecting Courses. For information on access to courses and exams, see section Course Registration. For information on how to get your Transcript of Records, see section Transcript of Records.
In the week before start of the lectures (winter semester) or on the first day of lecture time (summer semester), there are two introductory events:
The concrete day and time of both events is announced to all exchange students of Computer Science by e-mail.
Beside these events for Computer Science students, the International Office also organizes welcome days for all incoming students. We also recommend to participate in the welcome days. More information can be found here.
To look at offered courses, please log in into RWTHOnline. If you do not have any login data yet, click the button “continue without login”. Afterwards, chosse “Courses”. To get an overview on offered courses, select the appropriate semester and a curriculum.
Which curriculum to choose? We are offering several study programs:
Please just ignore the “[20xy] 1 Fach”, it just expesses the current examination regulations for our local students.
Note that many courses of the three Master study programs are identical. Thus you can restrict to Master “Informatik” to get an almost complete overview about offered courses, including minors, i.e. some courses from other study fields which our students can take. If you want to restrict to only Computer science courses, choose “Software Systems Engineering” to get a better overview.
Furthermore note that the electives in our Bachelor study program are a mostly subset of the courses offered in the Master programs - if you are only interested in courses taught in English, it is sufficient to have a look into the Master study programs. Independent of the study level you are coming here for, you are free to choose from all our study programs. Just make sure with your home university that the chosen courses can be accepted. If you are also interested in courses taught in German, you can also have a look at the obligatory courses in the Bachelor study program.
Pay attention when selecting courses from Media Informatics: Some of them are taught at University of Bonn – besides at least two hour of travel time by train and bus, access to courses in Bonn cannot be guaranteed.
If you want to search for courses in coming semesters, note that the course list for a semster is published only about three month before the semester starts. For planning a course list for your stay in advance (e.g. to set up a first learning agreement), please have a look at the previous semesters. Most courses are offered once a year, so you get a good approximation of the coming winter semester by having a look at the previous winter semester, and for the coming summer semester by having a look to the previous summer semester. To do so, you might have to use the Campus system.
Only relevant if you have to use the Campus system: In Campus, first of all make sure that in the switchbox at the top right corner the correct semester is selected. If not, switch it to the semester you want to have a look at. After having switched to the correct semester, in the left side menu access “Studiengänge”. In the main window, you now get listed an overview about all types of degrees our university offers. Here, choose “Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.)” or “Master of Science (M.Sc.)” - after doing so, the system lists all corresponding study programs. As above, you might restrict to “Informatik (M.Sc.)”. It might be a bit confusing that for many courses there are two, three or even four entries in the Campus system. all these entries belog to only one course, but represent different parts of it - a lecture (have a look into the last column on the web page: there is a “V” for “Vorlesung” - lecture), an exercise (“Ü” for “Übung” which means exercise), and an exam (“Kl” for “Klausur” which means written exam, or “MP” for “mündliche Prüfung” which is an oral exam). Unfortunately, most information in the Campus System is in German – you can browse courses, but how to get a description in English language? Such a description is available in another section of Campus, available in the left-side menu: “Modulhandbücher” (module handbooks). Select this menu entry and search for “BSInf” or “MSInf”. At the far end of the found row you find a description of all modules in rtf format (here are direct links to the module handbook RTF documents for Bachelor and Master of Computer Science). You can match courses between “Studiengänge” and “Modulhandbücher” by their course code (e.g. BSInf-55204102/10).
Most courses you can access without restrictions. Only a few have a restricted number of places. In such cases you should register soon after the semester has started if you like to participate.
If you are interested in attending a seminar or a lab, please note:
In general, exchange students can do a Bachelor or Master thesis during their stay at RWTH Aachen University. But, no thesis topics are guaranteed! You have to find a supvervisor/topic in the Computer Science Department by yourself. Only if you can provide an acceptance letter of one of our professors, you can include a thesis in your learning agreement.
If you are interested in doing a thesis: there is no central list of available topics. Just browse the list of research groups and contact the groups which are of interest for you to ask for possibilities in doing a thesis.
In general, you can also have a look to all other study programs of our university. But, we cannot guarantee access to courses outside of the Computer Science department. If you are interested in courses of other faculties/departments, please contact us soon to check if a certain course in general is open for Computer Science exchange students.
Exchange students are not enrolled to a specific study program at RWTH Aachen University. On one hand, this gives you freedom to choose a mix of courses from Bachelor- and Master study programs and from different faculties – but on the other hand you cannot make use of all registration procedures. Thus, we sometimes have to do some workarounds, which are described here.
Log in into RWTHonline and browse the course lists for those courses you want to attend. On the right side of each course entry there is a button “Course registration”. During the registration process you have to choose a study program in which you want to register this course. Becasue you are NOT assigned a concrete study program, you have to choose “Freie Anmeldung”. Probably this even is the only option which you can see.
For some courses there might be no “course registration” button. In such a case please visit the web pages of the teachers and/or attend the first course to get more information on if and how course registration is possible.
The mainpurpose of your registration is to get access to all course material and to participate in the corresponding exercises. Most course organization is done via RWTHmoodle – by your registration you are booked in the Moodle room assigned to a course. You need a TIM account to get access to this system. such an account you will get automatically when eonrolling at our university. In a Moodle room you can access slide copies, screen recordings of the lecture, exercise sheets, and submit solutions to exercises, depending on what is available for a course. Also, you will receive course notifications via this Moodle room. In some cases, a course does not make use of Moodle but has its own web page hosted by the research group who offers the course. You will learn about this during the first lectures.
You can register exams in RWTHonline usually without trouble. Only ensure that you are registering before the deadline!
Note that exam registration might differ for courses offered by other faculties. Thus, if you want to take such courses, please contact us about this issue soon.
The teacher can decide on the course organization. For getting admission to the final exam, you might have to solve frequent exercises during the semester, or you might have to participate in a presence exercise or a midterm exam. Details are given during the first lecture of a course.
See RWTHonline manual or FAQ on RWTHonline for more information on registrations (only accessible within our university’s network).
If you want to apply for an Internship in the Computer Science Department of RWTH Aachen University, please note: internships do not belong to our courses of study, thus there is no general support from our side, and there are no frequent offerings of internship positions.
If you want to do an internship, you have to find a position by yourself. You can have a look to our list of research groups to identify general topical areas you might be interested in. Study the web pages of the interesting research groups to identify professors or PhD students who work on concrete topics you find most interesting, and contact them to ask if an internship could be arranged.
Only if you can prove a statement of a professor and/or PhD student that you will get offered an internship position, we can accept your application.
In case you would like to change your Learning Agreement:
In case you have to write an exam at your home university while staying in Aachen, we can arrange a remote exam. In short: we are receiving a copy of your exam sheets, and you do the exam under our supervision at the same time as your exam at your home university takes place. Contact us early to fix such dates, and clarify with your home university whether they agree to do such a remote exam.
The same holds in the opposite direction: If you have to attend an exam here but you go back to your home university before, you might be allowed to write the exam at your home university. But, the teacher of the course has to agree to this procedure, and you have to find a person at your home university who supervises you while you are writing the exam. Again, contact us early if you want to make use of this option.
After the exams, we collect your results from the teachers of the courses you registered for. After having all results, we will print your transcript of records. If you are still in Aachen, you can make an appointment to get it, otherwise you get it sent by e-mail (a scan only) and mail.
For some courses you might receive a certificate with your results, e.g. German language courses. If you want us to include these results also, please hand in the certificates or scans of them.
The Computer Science departement is located outside of Aachen’s city center, but reachable by bus in a few minutes. Most research groups are located in building “Informatikzentrum” (German for “computer science center”) at Ahornstraße 55; a few others are in the “UMIC building” on Mies-van-der-Rohe-Straße or in the IT Center at Seffenter Weg / Kopernikusstraße.
Most Computer Science courses are taught in “Informatikzentrum”.
You can reach “Informatikzentrum” by bus 33 and 73 (bus stop “Hainbuchenstraße” or “Halifaxstraße”) or by bus 12, 22, 23 and 75 (bus stop “Halifaxstraße”).
Dirk Thissen
RWTH Aachen University
Department of Computer Science, Informatik 4 (COMSYS)
Room 9014
Ahornstraße 55
D-52074 Aachen
E-Mail: student-exchange@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
Tel: +49-241-8021403
Fax: +49-241-80621403