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Frequently Asked Questions

Below you’ll find answers to the questions we get asked the most about the excellence program Bachelor with Honors.

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Structure and Application

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’s program in an interdisciplinary way, or one that broadens or deepens some areas of your regular bachelor’s 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’s programs at universities, which complement or broaden your regular bachelor’s program and are relevant for science, subject to the fulfillment of the required prerequisites.
  • Informatics-related courses from official master’s programs at universities, which deepen some areas of your regular bachelor’s 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’s 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’s 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).

The standard Bachelor with Honors program comprises 45 ECTS and is subject to certain constraints (e.g, not more than one practical). To be able to “emulate” a full 4-years bachelor’s program, which is a mandatory prerequisite in many international master and doctoral programs, one needs 60 ECTS. Therefore, we offer an extended Bachelor with Honors program with up to 60 ECTS, where fewer restrictions apply.

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’s thesis or at your internships.

Every faculty member with habilitation is eligible for being a mentor. Please consult the Program Coordinator or one of our Deans of Academic Affairs if you don’t know who might fit your areas of interest.
No.
In principle, yes. However, your revised individual program will be scrutinized by the Deans of Academic Affairs according to the admission criteria, which also includes your performance in all the courses taken so far. It is hence quite likely that an exchange that is solely driven by this purpose will be noticed and rejected.
Through graduation in the Bachelor with Honors program, you can prove your exceptional performance way more effectively and internationally visible than with a distinction in your regular bachelor’s program. Moreover, it opens up additional possibilities that you may not consider relevant right now but may become relevant when you finish. In any case, the extra effort, which can be limited by a smart design of your Bachelor with Honors study program, would be an investment in your future.
Our (extended) Bachelor with Honors program is compatible with a 4-years international bachelor’s program, which will increase your chance to get admission to excellent international graduate schools. A Bachelor with Honors graduation gives you a clear competitive advantage.
You can re-use such a course, provided (i) it makes sense for your Bachelor with Honors program content-wise and (ii) you enrolled into and passed this course after you started your relevant Informatics study program.

Internships, Scholarships and Summer/Winter Schools

First of all, you need to find a host institution, ideally one of our current internship partners. Consult the information given there to find out about possible application deadlines, topics, contact persons, etc., and figure out, together with your mentor, whether you should indeed apply. For other host institutions, your mentor should check whether it meets our eligibility criteria and, if so, help you to establish the first contact.
For dedicated calls for scholarship applications, you will find information here. To apply for scholarships in the context of WWTF or FWF, you need to identify a relevant project and to contact its project leader.
Before starting an internship project, a brief preliminary description of the research work needs to be approved by the mentor and the supervisor of the hosting institution. After completion of the internship project, a project report has to be written by the student and approved by the mentor and the supervisor of the hosting institution. Moreover, the supervisor of the hosting institution has to provide a short assessment of the student’s performance. The mentor must submit these documents and a suggestion for a grade to our Dean of Academic Affairs, who will finally issue the certificate for the internship project.
It is not appropriate if an internship project takes substantially longer than the equivalent of 6 ECTS (i.e., 150 hours, about four weeks full-time). The reason is that excessive practicals create the danger of losing focus and possibly even failing the challenging completion criteria (average grade or maximum duration). Should you nevertheless plan a considerably longer internship, e.g., via the 60 ECTS extended Bachelor with Honors program, you should consult the Dean of Academic Affairs before for advice.
Please contact Tamara Lenes at the Studiendekanat by email.
If the host meets our requirements, it is sufficient if your mentor certifies this after your internship, when requesting accreditation from the Dean of Academic Affairs. Otherwise, you need to get approval from the Dean of Academic Affairs before your internship starts. A list of out current academic and industrial partners is available here.
With support from your mentor, please check the compatibility of a considered summer or winter school with regard to 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. Your mentor has to to attach the school’s official certificate of attendance and a short justification of the to be issued grade by e-mail. The school’s official certificate of attendance must provide the following information (X=75 for 3 ECTS, X=50 for 2 ECTS): “Name” has successfully participated in the Summer/Winter School “Title”, “Date”, “Place”, which amounted to a students workload of at least X hours.”

Graduation

The “Gesamtnote” of every “Prüfungsfach” (according to the curriculum document) must not be worse than “2-Gut”, and at least as many of the “Prüfungsfächer” completed with “2-Gut” must have been completed with “1-Sehr Gut”. The “Gesamtnote” of a “Prüfungsfach” is computed as the ECTS-weighted average of all the courses it comprises of; it must be less or equal to 1.5 to earn “1-Sehr Gut”.

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.

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.”

No, it is a document issued by TU Wien that certifies your additional qualification.
If you have already issued the announcement of completion of your Bachelor with Honors program and need a confirmation before the official graduation (which will happen once a year only in the future, in the context of the TU Wien Informatics Award ceremony), you can request a pre-certificate from our Dekanat. Just send a request to bhons-informatics@list.tuwien.ac.at.
No. For admission to one of the doctoral programs at TU Wien you need a master degree. Note carefully, however, that a smart design of your Bachelor with Honors study program (namely, a fair share of courses from a suitable master’s program) would allow you to complete a master’s program reasonably faster.
The responsible dean of academic affairs will issue the certificate when you apply for the completion of your Bachelor with Honors program.