Hi everyone! I’m a junior from Mumbai and seriously considering my options for graduate school. I keep hearing conflicting things about studying in Germany - some people say it’s amazing because of free tuition, others say the language barrier and job market make it really tough.
I’ve been doing some research and found this detailed guide about the whole process, but I’d love to hear from people who have actually been through this. Has anyone here done their Masters in Germany? How was the application process? Did you need to learn German beforehand?
This site is primarily focused on U.S. college admissions, so you may not receive much advice about German college admissions here.
It may be amazing from an US point of view how lost cost German universities are, but you definitely get what you pay for. It is no frills, sink or swim, no handholding - I’m running out of metaphors…
And while you can definitely find graduate programs run in English and can easily survive speaking English, most Germans being somewhat conversational, you will be lonely, you will constantly have minor issues which wouldn’t be an issue at all without the language barrier, and you will definitely not find a job.
You do not mention where you are currently studying: in India or the US? If you are not expecting the comfort of a US campus, you will not be too badly lost but
it’s hard to be happy not speaking the language of a country’s people. It’s not actually a bilingual country though it sometimes pretends to be.
The question, though somewhat off topic for this site, does come up regularly and I always answer it with: go to Germany because you want to go there, because the culture, the language, the people, the specific strengths of its educational (yes there are some) and economic system draw you, but not because it’s rich and unis are free. It will not answer.