A Typical Semester at KTH – Engineering Sciences

Hello everybody and welcome to this new post! Today, I want to share some insights into a typical semester at KTH Engineering Sciences school. We will have a webinar on the Engineering Sciences school tomorrow, so if you are a prospective Engineering student be sure not to miss it!

What is a “School” at KTH?

At KTH, “Schools” represent groups of programmes with some common traits. For example, the Engineering Sciences school includes courses like Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Naval Architecture, Engineering Physics, etc. Therefore, you can expect the programmes belonging to the same School to share some courses or approaches, and they often collaborate on research projects together. In tomorrow’s webinar, you will learn more about the individual programmes belonging to the school as well as what it’s like to study Engineering at KTH, the best technical university in Sweden!

The structure of a typical semester

So, how does a typical semester at KTH look like? First of all, KTH semesters are divided into two periods, and usually courses are taught on a period-basis. This means that you will likely have some courses in the first part of the semester, then an exam week, and then new courses will begin in the second half of the semester. I think this is amazing, as you can focus on just a couple of courses at a time, completely diving into the subject you are being taught!

What about the Engineering Sciences school?

When it comes to the semester structure, the Engineering Sciences school makes no exception. You have four periods per year, divided in two semesters. You typically have four ordinary exam sessions per year, plus some re-exam weeks where you can re-do exams you failed or retake an older exam to get a better grade. Most courses at the Engineering Sciences school have a strong front lecture component as well as project-based learning. This means that you do have a lot of theoretical lectures, but the theory is then put into practice via assignments, group/individual projects and lab work. I find this to be a very good mix! To become a good engineer, it is necessary to have both a strong theoretical basis as well as a project-oriented approach, and KTH blends both seamlessly.

My current semester

As an example, I thought I’d give you an overview of what my semester is looking like this Winter! I am currently in the second year of the Master’s programme in Engineering Mechanics, which is part of the Engineering Sciences school.

This semester, which runs from late August to Christmas (with the exam period at the beginning of January), I have taken one course in Period 1 and another course in Period 2. In parallel, I am taking a semester-long Project Course. The first course that I took (in Period 1) regarded the application of data-driven methods to problems in Engineering Mechanics, and I found it extremely cool! We could learn about machine learning algorithms as well as other simpler data-driven techniques to develop reduced order models and do other cool stuff in Fluid Mechanics. The course I’m taking this period is instead related to English writing for projects and thesis, which is quite useful even if not strictly related to my area of expertise.

As I told you, KTH puts great emphasis on project-based learning: this is exemplified by the project course I’m attending now, where I am developing a CFD problem in collaboration with an important Swedish company. Super nice to develop useful hands-on experience!

It is important to underline that elective courses play a big role in Engineering Sciences, and all of the courses I’m taking this year are electives.

This was all for today’s post! As always, thank you for making it this far. Don’t forget to check out the upcoming KTH webinars and read Sam’s last post on KTH campus history, as well as Sai’s post on the application timeline.

I’ll see you in the next post, have a nice week!

// Lorenzo