Frequently Asked Questions
Below you’ll find answers to the questions we get asked the most about the excellence program Bachelor with Honors.
Structure and Application
How shall/can I structure my program proposal?
The composition of your individual Bachelor with Honors study program is primarily a matter of your personal interests. Essentially, you can choose between a program that either complements your regular bachelor program in an interdisciplinary way, or one that broadens or deepens some areas of your regular bachelor program. Try to assemble courses matching your interests that are coherent topic-wise and can be subsumed under a crisp title (like “scientific computing” or “applied systems security”). As a rule of thumb, your chosen program is usually fine if you can write a convincing justification.
Please provide a single .pdf containing your program, its title, its qualification profile and justification. It shall also contain a (ideally structured into reasonable modules) table with the courses making up your program, providing course number, title, type, ECTS, and a flag telling whether it is a Bachelor- or Master-level course. Moreover, please provide a semester breakdown, i.e., information in which semester you plan to take the courses.
Eligible Courses
- Mandatory courses from official bachelor programs at universities, which complement or broaden your regular bachelor program and are relevant for science, subject to the fulfillment of the required prerequisites.
- Informatics-related courses from official master programs at universities, which deepen some areas of your regular bachelor program, science, subject to the fulfillment of the required prerequisites.
- Bachelor with Honors-specific courses from the list below and, subject to approval by the Deans of Academic Affairs, fitting complementary courses and/or non-trivial soft-skill courses (languages, scientific presentation etc.).
General Constraints
- More than half of the ECTS of your program must be courses from TU Wien.
- More than half of the ECTS of your program must not have been completed already at the time of your application for admission to the Bachelor with Honors program.
- Your program must not be (essentially) a proper subset of a single Master program at TU Wien.
Specific Constraints
Note that the term “standard Bachelor with Honors-program” refers to a 45 ECTS program, as opposed to the “extended Bachelor with Honors-program” with up to 60 ECTS.
- There is no Bachelor with Honors-specific extended bachelor thesis project. However, you can foresee one additional regular bachelor practical (6 ECTS) as part of the standard Bachelor with Honors-program.
- At most one seminar (3 ECTS) in the standard Bachelor with Honors-program.
- The inclusion of any course in your individual Bachelor with Honors study program is only possible if you can justify having all the prerequisites, e.g., bia appropriate courses in our regular bachelor program.
Dedicated Bachelor with Honors Courses
- 1 ECTS SE Orientierung Bachelor with Honors der Informatik und
Wirtschaftsinformatik (mandatory)
- Covers mentoring effort (once per mentee, upon admission to the Bachelor with Honors program)
- First steps Bachelor with Honors community building
- 6 ECTS PR Bachelor with Honors Internship-Projekte (external supervision) (optional)
- 3 ECTS VU Internationale Summer/Winter School (optional), or 2 ECTS VU Internationale Summer/Winter School (optional) — To get a certificate for this course, you need a certificate of attendance from the summer/winter School, which must provide the following information (X=75 for 3 ECTS, X=50 for 2 ECTS): “Name” has successfully participated in the Summer/WinterSchool “Title”, “Date”, “Place”, which amounted to a students workload of at least X hours.”
With support from your mentor, please check the compatibility of a considered summer/winter school w.r.t. the general topic of your individual Bachelor with Honors-program, and the compatibility with the above requirements before your apply! The certificate for the course will be issued by the Deans of Academic Affairs on request of your mentor (who has to send the above mentioned certificate of attendance and a short justification of the to be issued grade by email).
Why is there a range of 45-60 ECTS for the study program?
What is the role of the mentor?
Advice and support in the application phase, in particular, for the composition of your Bachelor with Honors study program, and primary contact point in all matters related to the program and your studies in general. Your mentor will also help you in finding internship hosts, summer/winter schools, and getting in touch with international researchers in general.
Note that the mentor need not (but can, of course) be the supervisor of your bachelor thesis or at your internships.
How do I find a suitable mentor?
Can I apply for the Bachelor with Honors program after graduation?
Can I replace a poorly graded course by revising my proposed program?
Why should I enroll if I will enroll in a master program at TU Wien Informatics?
Why should I enroll if I consider graduate studies abroad?
Can I re-use an already taken course from a different study program in my Bachelor with Honors program?
Internships, Scholarships and Summer/Winter Schools
How do I apply for an internship?
How do I apply for a scholarship?
How do I get a certificate for my internship project?
How long can an internship project last?
How do I find out about the availability of a faculty scholarship for a planned internship project?
What do I do if my intended internship host is not in the list of partner institutions?
How do I get a certificate for a summer/winter school?
Graduation
What are the requirements to graduate the regular bachelor program “mit Auszeichnung”?
What means “Abschluss innerhalb von 9 Semestern”?
The completion criteria must be satisfied within at most nine semesters, starting from the beginning of your very first regular Bachelor program in Informatics or Business Informatics: All courses, exams etc. must have been completed by the official end of your 9th semester (including the “Nachfrist” for SS: end of October, for WS: end of March), with certificates issued for those dates at the latest.
However, due to Corona, the following exemption applies: Students who started the Bachelor program relevant for their Bachelor with Honors graduation by the beginning of SS2022 (or before) have 10 semesters instead of 9 semesters for satisfying the completion criteria.
What is the Bachelor with Honors certificate?
The certificate not only confirms that you are among the < top-5% of our students, but also lists the courses of your individual Bachelor with Honors study program. It is also personalized in that it briefly describes your individual features and accomplishments. Note that it is your mentor who has to provide a draft for this paragraph.
Here’s an example of such a paragraph:
“First name is an outstanding student with remarkable logical thinking/problem-solving skills. He possesses an extraordinary ability to understand large systems quickly on different layers and find errors in software. First name was an impressively committed tutor for various Databases, Data Analysis, and Software Engineering courses for two years. According to his colleagues, he was always a significant enrichment to the whole group in multiple classes. Besides his excellent work, it was also crucial for him to consider the social aspects when collaborating with colleagues.”