EMSE - European Master in Software Engineering

Emse is an Erasmus Mundus program which I've written about in my previous post.
The main host university is Universidad Politecnica de Madrid where I've been studying my first year. The other partner universities are BTH in Sweden, Technical University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and Free University of Bolzano in Italy.
When you apply for the program you are asked to declare your preferences about which 2 universities you would like to go. But this doesn't mean that you'll definitely go there. Although for most of the cases they try to consider those preferences.

You can find detailed information about the program in their website here.
I'll try to give more unofficial information. In my term 1200 people applied for this program and 12 Category-A students (non-Europe) were awarded scholarship and 8-10 Category B (Europe) students. The applications close in around december and you'll receive the results sometime in april.
I can't really say anything specific about selection criteria since I don't know anything other than the information in the website. I didn't graduate with a high GPA from my previous university (I mean less than 3/4.00) and I was surprised to be accepted. These years, it seems like they value working experience a lot since the students are a bit older and the classes mostly target them.

There are a lot of students in their 30s who are working at the same time and taking this master almost like an executive MBA program. They are not EMSE students like us but we take the same classes. Anyway, there are quite a number of EMSE students who are in between 27-30.

Hence, the classes are more focuses on Engineering part of Software. The obvious examples would be Requirement Eng, Quality Management, Project Management, etc.

Among the 4 universities, Madrid is the only one which is in a big city. The others are all in very very small areas. That's why I chose Madrid. The other common destination is Germany. People prefer it because they think there's good opportunity to find jobs. It actually applies for Sweden since BTH has good industrial connections. But people don't really like to go that north maybe :)

Well in the begining I chose Sweden for my second year. We will see how it will  be like. I'm expecting that courses will not be as hard as Germany.

That's all that comes to my mind for now..

Erasmus Mundus Program

In this post, I'll try to clarify some unknown things about Erasmus Mundus Programs. First of all, it's not a regular Erasmus Exchange program that everybody knows. This is a joint Master or a Doctorate program that allows you to graduate with at least 2 diplomas from European universities. It's not like you already have a university like in Erasmus, after you finish your undergraduate degree, you apply for these programs individually directly from the websites of the programs.
In the end, you study 1 year in one unversity and the next year in another university (this can also be 3 universities with 6 months in 2 of them and 1 year another). All the courses are offered in English and they provide VERY generous scholarships especially for non-european students.

The scholarship is about 16000 euros a year for Category A students which means non-european. Turkey is also in this part although you might come across some wrong information about this. Actually they opened a special window for Turkey and Balkans and each program accepts more or less 2 students from this window. Before this Turkey wasn't eligible. It's been only 3 years for Turkey so this program is still not very known.

For the European students the scholarship is about 6000 euros a year. This is quite weird actually, because the gap between europeans and others is really huge, and surprisingly on the favor of non-europeans.
When you search information about the programs, you'll see third-countries instead of non-european.. This doesn't mean third world country but the countries which are not host.

You can find a full list of programs in this link which is from the official page of Erasmus Mundus.

I'm studying in European Master in Software Engineering and I'll mention about this program in another post.