Is Hungarian universities that bad or people are just pessimist?

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kozacsaba@reddit

I wouldn't say pessimistic, but we Hungarians looove complaining and comparing who has it worse. This doesn't mean they are pessimistic about things, it's just nice to talk it out.

Now about the universities: Yes, university is hard, and it is supposed to be. I mean in some of these courses they teach you things in a month, that you would study and practice in highschool for a year. Of course that is hard. But the reason you might find the dropout rate surprisingly high, is because in Budapest, it is very easy to get in to cs (you dont need too many points). That is because what you lack in studies, you can make up for with (even harder) hard work. Now unfortunately not many people do that (which I can undertand and justify in many cases) and decide to drop out.

I hate reading and hearing about which uni is better / worse, becase it is usually not that simple. They are just different. So much of what you will need in a workplace, you will learn after you start working. Many places in Hungary know this and therefore don't care which uni you came from. I finished at BME, but in electrical engineering, not cs. We were on the same branch as Comuter engineering and had many of the same courses, that is why I feel confident giving you advice about this. From what I heard, ELTE will focus mostly on theory and will give you more of a scientist-y experience, would recommend if you want to pursue a phd and research. Óbudai will give you a more hands-on, practical experience, would recommend if you want to start working right away in Hungary, and know what you are doing. BME is somewhere inbetween.

If this doesn't help you choose, look at specialisations (which should be part of the bsc degree) and see if any uni offers something you like.

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Kethros_@reddit

hey- I'm looking into BME and ELTE. You say it's get in, eh? Is it holistic evaluation? or based mainly on entrance (provided you meet minimum docs requirements)? I Kinda love pure math and CS too now..sounds perfect heh. I also apologize for asking so abruptly. Thanks!

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Designer-Hippo3524@reddit

With Stipendium Hungaricum it does not really matters. You will get a degree for nothing.

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Prestigious-Job-9825@reddit

Hungarian people are very pessimistic. That's something to keep in mind if you come here.

About universities, get a CS degree anywhere you want, but unless you're some genius or programming prodigy, networking / personal connections and big personal projects are the most important things when getting a job. Otherwise, it's luck.

Sadly, it is a tough world for juniors right now. But best of luck to you!

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

So its not like if im gonna get a diploma from here it has no recognition worldwide or like the worst option cause these bad reviews are very discourged me

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Accurate-Poet7113@reddit

Obviously these have no recognition worldwide check the rankings. Also people don’t even know Hungary exists in most parts of the world let alone some random uni in Hungary. If you are really smart you can still have a good career though

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Bruce3662@reddit

u/Accurate-Poet7113 I'm sorry to say but this comment makes no sense at all. Hungary might not be as popular as some of the western european countries but that doesn't mean the quality of education in Hungary is inferior in any sense. Popularity has nothing to do what you can learn from studying in a country.
I mean we literally we have courses/degrees updates each semester in University of Szeged and I'm sure it's the same in almost all the other universities in Hungary so their curriculum is exactly what is needed in both the job market and academia if you're into research.
As for opportunities, there are plenty, ofcourse you cannot directly get a senior level job with a bachelors degree and no experience but you can definitely score an internship after completing a few semesters here and in most of the cases, the same company hires you for a full time job as well, and that's basically how it works in almost every country including in the USA.
Infact even ivy league universities don't support you in your career development as some of these european universities do and hungary is one of those countries with such universities.

You might have a very bad personal experience but if you're doing well in university then you can simply not do bad in your professional life because you're literally learning what you'll be required to do in your professional career.
And no worldwide recognition?

There are many hungarian universities that are in the top 500 world wide ranking and again as someone above pointed, rankings are based on factors that don't indicate the quality of education.

University of Szeged for example has very limited programs so it's on a huge disadvantage compared to the ones with so many degree programs but even then it's ranking is quite high and much better than most of the european and american universities. The same goes for the rest of the Hungarian universities and they do have world wide recognition dude. Name a single country that doesn't accept the diploma you get from Hungary?

And if you're not retarded yourself then you can easily find employment in europe after graduating from here and so far my experience has been significantly better than what I expected.

The people might be pessimistic here but they are not discriminating and anyone who comes here will have a much better experience than most of the other european countries.

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Accurate-Poet7113@reddit

I was commenting on worldwide recognition in terms of if people know these unis. I would be surprised if anybody would know them in western Europe.

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Bruce3662@reddit

You'd be surprised if anyone knows them in Western Europe, while there are so many students from there, and all the top Hungarian universities collaborate in every single category, from sports to research, with the Western European universities. How can anyone have exchange programs, workshops, educational, social, and sports events with Hungarian universities and still have no idea about these universities?

Hungary is undoubtedly not as popular as some of the Western countries, but that doesn't mean people don't know about its universities.

People don't dream of migrating to China either, but that doesn't mean the world doesn't know about them or their universities.

People are simply not as aware of the culture and other similar things because, apparently, Western European countries do look down upon the Eastern European countries and assume Hungary is also one. That's why it's not the first choice of most of the people who eventually end up coming here, and I am not denying it. That's a separate topic, and I don't want to go into details of why that is the case. It is the overall country that matters to them more than its universities.

A perfect example is the choice between Italy and Germany. Some of the top-ranked Italian universities are ranked much better than almost all of the German universities, but Germany is significantly more popular than Italy for students. Despite Italian universities being very popular, people will always choose a low-ranked German university over a very high-ranked Italian university because of the perception they have about both countries.

And you're just getting confused between a country being less popular or in demand and a lack of recognition.

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Accurate-Poet7113@reddit

Have you ever lived in western Europe talked about Hungarian universities when you were there ? Also do you know any Slovakian universities ?

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

Their rankings are not really bad and i think hungarian people just compare their unis with MIT

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CommercialShot2087@reddit

Ranking does not tell anything about the quality of education at all.

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Ok-Scheme-913@reddit

Also, I doubt it's applicable to smaller universities. For example Semmelweis is an only medical university, how can it compete with something like Harvard which has every field on Earth?

But also, ELTE/BME do have a wide range of fields, but they are almost separate entities. Does it really make sense to compare their decent Math institute next to the Law one (not saying the latter is bad, I only know the math/CS one from ELTE), when the only common thing is administrative?

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YellowMugBentMug@reddit

btw actually medical universities / faculties tend to come up near the top on such rankings

due to publication stats (papers published in high impact factor journals matter more in such rankings than e.g. conference papers, and in the medical field (and also in biology, chemistry) the typical publication is published in some journal -- in cs, conferences are much more popular)

in hungary, this helps a bit some universities outside budapest (debrecen, szeged, etc.), which have medical faculties, while elte or bme do not

or nobel prizes

e.g. szeged has two nobel prize winners, which helps it in university rankings

does it help cs education? of course not

likewise, elte has a physicist nobel laureate who helps in rankings, but does not help cs

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god-loves-yeeters@reddit

Well no, Europe also has great universities. I'm guessing you're not from the EU and cant take advantage of the free (and better) education of the Nordic countries? If a paper for cheap is what you are after, and dont mind that you're probably not gonna learn useful stuff, then it's alright I think.

You probably should expand on your motivations for studying in Hungary and your priorities on what you want to get out of it, so people can actually help you with their insights. Cuz rn this way people are only shooting their shots in the dark.

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YellowMugBentMug@reddit

their rankings is around the "some european university" level

im not sure if you can name 3 polish universities for example, which are notable in cs

yet if you have to answer whether are one of this is better than a(n also unknown) university of iraq or iran (or, for that matter, azerbaijan), you could make an educated guess

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Nalarean@reddit

I would also suggest trying to get an internship as early as possible. More experience will open up more opportunities. Although this is not hungary specific. (It is sucky, you’ll have less time to party and etc. but worthwhile in the long run)

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Ok-Scheme-913@reddit

I think unless you do a degree at MIT, no one cares about the institution in the IT field. It's just a basic pass for HR to check something.

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Specialist_Track_325@reddit

Also, keep in mind if the government is paying for ur spot you'll have to stay and work the same amount of time you spent in uni. I'm not sure if this only applies to Hungarian students or not but keep it in mind just in case, and make sure to read everything u sign

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cicamicacica@reddit

I think BME is the most recognized: if nothing else, Pragmatic Engineer is the most famous hungarian in the industry and he used to go there.

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Prestigious-Job-9825@reddit

Don't think too much about it. A degree definitely helps and I recommend getting one, but unless it's a super famous place like Harvard or something, recruiters won't care too much where it is from. They'll care MUCH more about your tech stack, your personal projects, etc. And it helps a lot if you're somewhat connected in the tech community.

I know guys who don't even have degrees and work as Tech Leads, earning a LOT of money. I know talented juniors with degrees who can't land a job. A degree helps, but it isn't everything.

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Illustrious-Bike-817@reddit

Hungarians are glass is always half empty, hate your neighbor, life sucks people. So dont listen to us

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Tejcsicicoo@reddit

Hungarian universities are hardcore stress-centers. They won't teach you much, they will do it with medieval methods and then they will expect everything on the exams, and more. The standards of evaluation aren't very transparent most of the time.

Basically, if you can get through a programme, that means that you are a resilient person or you manage stress well. Any knowledge you earn will be due to your own effort, but I have seen really dumb people get their degree by simply being persistent and throwing results at teachers and they got bored with them and just let them pass.

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Ok-Scheme-913@reddit

This is pretty much what every university is like. Especially the "Any knowledge you earn will be due to your own effort" bit - some people expect their teachers to feed them the subject as they are in primary school..

Every university is worth as much as you make out of it.

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Tejcsicicoo@reddit

>some people expect their teachers to feed them

With good reason. You are literally spending millions on tuition.

It genuinely baffles me how universities, supposed centers and ivory towers of learning are still stuck in the 16th century in terms of pedagogy, even though we already have shitloads of research about learning and teaching now.

You are literally giving your time, money, energy, your very lifeblood to a credential-gatekeeping maffia.

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Ok-Scheme-913@reddit

The process of learning something is absolutely intricate. There is simply no way for a live presentation to convey every information - you just can't concentrate for that long, you may lose at one point and never get back to the live state, everyone has different speeds and background knowledge so what may be fast for you is slow for others, etc. This is simply impossible to share everything through this media.

Guess what, we have fking books that are the absolute most wonderful human invention, and they can be read at the correct speed any number of times.

A good teacher is there to share interesting ideas, experiences, connect different pieces of the material together and to keep up some motivation about the material - and especially importantly answer questions that are left unanswered by other materials.

But learning can't be a passive thing, without actual effort you can never learn anything. You have to fking sit down and engage with the material yourself.

It's easy to blame the schooling system, but there is no replacement for this.

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Tejcsicicoo@reddit

It is easy to blame the schooling system, because it is absolute garbage and is an institution of gatekeepers. Anyone can learn whatever they want without the stress of having to participate in the bulllshit academic setting. I have a degree by the way so it's not a sour grapes situation.

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EquivalentDraft3245@reddit

Hundred percent this. Sadly Hungarian CS uni is garbage. Especially ELTE. Don’t go there. They will eat your soul for breakfast. Giving back nothing. Cheers mate!

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gecike@reddit

I went and it was fine. Sure, there's effort involved, but they're not asking for anything impossible.

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AcanthisittaOne4361@reddit

My university pal used to say that we're learning on the uni to get a certificate, but we're working there (as students) to learn something. And he was right, everything I've used since I learned during work - at the uni.

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Perfect-Jicama-7759@reddit

Elte and BME has good reputation. I studied at ELTE (mechanical engineering and computer science)

In CS i attended english classes with stipendium.hungarica students. The university has so much money from.this scolarship, the expectations were set very low so as not to fail even one foreign student, because then they would lose money. The master's program was a joke because of this. However the hungarian part was fine.

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YellowMugBentMug@reddit

"Mostly entries related to szeged complain about its high fail rate (i have seen this in medicine programmes so idk actually if it is true for cs classes)"

failing at exams is not that common i guess

perhaps hard to get into the program, this might be the case, but god knows why

as i heard, there was only one international msc student this year who got accepted to cs szeged via stipendium hungaricum

(in the previous years it was around 8-12 iirc)

over this, the university has exactly zero control

some guess was that because there is a cs bsc now, and the ministry (or whoever decides this) adds the number of the cs sh bsc and msc students together (so more sh bsc students --> less sh msc students)

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Fuckboneheadbikes@reddit

*Are

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

sorry

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CockolinoBear@reddit

How about giving back the free Stipendum money back or even donating it to a Hungarian student, since we don't get half this much monthly for just studying 🫠 You are being a twat, you know that? How about staying in Azerbaijan, and joining the military? Sounds compelling to me...

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

Nope

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This_Hotel3732@reddit

Please keep in mind that the Hungarian and English BSc curricula are very different in practice. The latter is often watered down due to the mixed academic background of inbound students, made worse by the fact that sometimes they can barely speak any English. So there is no need to worry about comments regarding difficulty from Hungarian students.

Still, these universities offer appropriate foundations even if you want to pursue an academic career - former students did PhDs at prestigious westerner universities and some have even become professors.

Regarding location, it can be difficult to get internships as a foreign student outside of Budapest.

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orangutanbanan@reddit

+1 it is not as hard as the hungarian counterpart, but that's not necesseraly a problem. I wrote exams together with english BSc students and saw their exams. It was decent, not too easy not too hard. They don't give the diploma for free there either.

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Bruce3662@reddit

It's the same. we literally get the exact same slides and exams as the hungarian students and I am talking from my experience in University of Szeged. I'm not sure about your specific university but in our university, the slides and exams that we get are basically just the translations and the teachers are same too. They just give us translated versions of everything. And the exams are exactly the same because we sometimes even discuss them in the hungarian discord and I use the material that the hungarian students have as the international students don't get older exams/tests because of translation efforts so if anything, we're honestly at a disadvantage here.

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orangutanbanan@reddit

Look, I attended a Western European university too, which was pretty ahead on the global ranking. To be honest, I was studying hard here in Hungary, and therefore I felt smart abroad.

Hungarians ( I was too) are pretty pessimistic, but I learnt that our unis are really good, if you are willing to work hard. I honestly think that if we received the same funding as some westerner unis, we would also somewhere on the top.

I attended BME, it was pretty hard and strict compared to the westerner uni, but I cannot talk about compsci. At BME they were pretty harsh on us sometimes, but never with english speaking students. They always got the kind lecturers, and no unnecessarily hard exams, like us.

And i think you can find a great community here, even from your country. I would say go for it!

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

thank you!

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Emotional_Brother223@reddit

I studied at SZE (Gyor) and it was great , I remember I was hesitating between this or BME back then.

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throwawaydotthis@reddit

I've had a similar experience, altough from what I heard they drastically restructured the curriculum, more interesting classes, and more modern tech has been added but the course has also been made easier. I also had a mate ditch ELTE CS for SZE CS after a few semesters and he said SZE was a lot more practical, ELTE was more theoretical, but I'm not sure whether that's still the case. I was also contemplating BME but as you also said, companies, especially abroad don't know / care about either of them and your skills are for more important than where you got the degree.

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_ZoroX_@reddit

It's still the case. I have friends who study at BME, and we learn a lot more actually useful things at SZE than they do.

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ImaginaryData5345@reddit

From your perspective, you should also consider how well they support international students, the ratio of international students & faculty, etc. AFAIK, Corvinus University is the best in that, but they only have Business Information Technology and Data Science programs, no Computer Science.

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Peter-Pan-Must-Die@reddit (OP)

Hungary and famous? waow. I have seen several times that Hungary is not famous with anything and they say it like it is the worst country in the world, I actually think it depends on personal experience but that comments were concerning for me like hello? you have universities in top 500

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vasarmilan@reddit

I'm a freelancer working mainly with US/UK companies, and I hear a lot that they like working with Hungarians and overall trust our skills.

They probably never heard of the specific universities or anything like that, but that would be true for literally any small country. However, they might associate the country with overall positive experiences.

With that said, I have little to say about the actual teaching quality, because I didn't do a CS degree.

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ImaginaryData5345@reddit

As I said, most Hungarians are very pessimistic, but not all of them :) People who have problems are always louder than the satisfied ones, so whatever you read online is usually not representative, because the positive ones aren't sharing.

Computer science/IT is one of the most popular fields of study in Hungary each year.

I’d suggest using other sources, talking with practising professionals, and seeing where they studied and where they ended up working.

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BanaTibor@reddit

The prestigious ones are harder because that is a filter and they can choose from a bigger pool. I totally understand those who choose a not so difficult university. Most of the subjects you will learn are useless anyway. Not worth it to get some mental or physical health issue over them. I suggest you to look at the rankings, but look for the worst ones, avoid those.

It is also worth considering a university not in Budapest, life is much cheaper, basically anywhere else in the country.

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EmptySoulCanister@reddit

As someone who has studied in Hungary and in Denmark, the two are not even comparable. The entire Hungarian higher education system is horrendous. You get around 8 couple ECTS courses per semester (each having their own lectures, exercises, handins, midterms and finals), meaning you will have zero chance to actually be immersed in the ones you might like.

You will probably want to work next to it just to survive which makes the entire experience hell.

Once you are finished you will have a degree with incredibly limited practical use and mental health close to a burnout.

I honestly cannot recommend it.

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Kesh4n@reddit

I went to ELTE Software Engineering / CS Bachelor, dropped out after 2 years. At the time, around 7% of people passed the math exams. The programming classes were pretty easy, the math classes were unnecessarily hard, and the professors seemed to get off on fucking with the students.

If I were to restart my life, I would go to a coding school and study to become a full stack dev or similar, but not sure if I should recommend that now with AI and what not.

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Minimum_Rice555@reddit

While BME is hard, it's not TU Munich or TU Delt level. The level of teaching is poor apart from a few courses. It's nothing like MIT for example, where they introduce complex topics in context and in a way you understand it. You can check what I'm talking about in the MIT open courseware. Regionally BME is a good university and is useful for networking and getting internships. In global context, I don't think it's in the top 500 universities, which matches my experience.

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Plenty_Courage_3311@reddit

Every IT degree what you get in European Union is great and usable if you really want it

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RelentlessPolygons@reddit

It doesn't matter where you study. It's a piece of paper, get it anywhere you can. Work experience will matter.

However I'd reconsider CS right now because entry level jobs disappeared for that career and you will have a hard time finding a job especially as a foreigner. Choose any other STEM field if you can.

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Bear_the_serker@reddit

I have finished my degree not long ago at Unviersity of Szeged in Computer Science Operational Engineering, after switching from computer science.

Most of the curriculum could be way better in a lot aspects, recently there have been huge changes for several reasons (geriatic fossil teachers with antiquated bullshit retiring, a bunch of professors quit because the entire education system has been a pile of rubble for a time now -> about 1/3 of the curriculum got deleted and replaced because there is no one to replace the teachers). As of now, the way things are taught and the way exams are held is a very out of season april's fools joke.

One other insanely infuriating aspect is the fact that our rector is a literal criminal who got away with performing surgery while being covid positive, and also infecting a significant amount of university staff back during pandemic because he is a strawman of our current soft dictatorship leaders. He ignored covid restrictions and regulations as a medical professional, and he got away scot free.

So yeah, the pessimism is usually very much based on huge actual issues. It's just most hungarians also give 0 fucks about anything outside their 4 walls, so a lot of people are completely oblivious to the reasons behind the actual systemic issues.

This is already long, hit me with a dm if you want more.

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foghatyma@reddit

BME is very good if you put time and effort into it.

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d1722825@reddit

The first thing is at many university there are differences between the Hungarian-oriented and the international-oriented courses, many times they are taught by different people. So as an international student your experience might be very different from what you hear from Hungarian people. I suggest to try to get feedback from people who enrolled as an international student (not me), too.

AFAIK Hungary had a fairly strong engineering education a while back (30-50 years), but it got worse due to cost cuts and due to the process of entrance exams. None of the Hungarian universities are or have ever been famous like MIT, Caltec or similar.

During my studies I thought that the universities are terrible and that wasn't an uncommon opinion. There were insane number of missed opportunity of how things could be better with just a little bit of effort, a bit of money, or just less red tape. Hungarian universities are very bad compared to how good they could be if they wouldn't waste their potential, and many people see and feel that, and it may be the cause of some of the pessimism.

In other hand, I have seen courses form world-famous universities on edX which were clearly worse than what I had. During work I saw that it is much more important how interested and how motivated someone are than what university they enrolled.

Traditionally there were two different "universities" in Hungary with a shorter and a longer curriculum. The shorter one was more practice oriented and the longer one is more academically-oriented. But then these were mapped to BSc and MSc (with some issues). BME and I think ELTE had the longer curriculum and OE (Obudai) and a few other had the shorter one.

Probably this is the thing behind prestigious / elitist / harder / etc., but I think today not a lot remains from these (except maybe some healthy mockery). They are all hard, just in a different way.

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MartonFerencziMoth@reddit

Not bad at all. It can’t quite compete with MIT, but it’s ranked among the top few hundred universities in Europe. You might also consider applying to Óbuda University – John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics, as its programs are more focused on modern computer science compared to BME or ELTE. ELTE’s Faculty of Informatics has its roots in mathematics, while BME’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics is traditionally more engineering-oriented — but Óbuda University’s NIK is dedicated purely to computer science.

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