Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

I’m Viivi and I was as an Erasmus exchange student in Tübingen, Germany during their summer semester 2023. I study biomedicine in Skövde, and in Tübingen I took courses from their Graduate Training Center of Neuroscience.

Favourite things 

My favourite things during the exchange include all the trips I did, and also just enjoying life in Tübingen. During my exchange I travelled both abroad and in Germany, in the Baden-Württemberg area. I visited Austria, Switzerland, and France. In Germany I visited for example Konstanz, Ulm, and Ludwigsburg. I took a public transport ticket that was valid on all the regional trains and buses in Baden-Württemberg. This made travelling in the area easy and inexpensive.

Tübingen

Tübingen is a university city where a lot of the inhabitants are students. This is something I liked about the city. There are three student clubs in the city, and the university offers for example a lot of different sports classes. During my free time, I spent a lot of time with my friends having picnics and dinners for example. The biggest event in Tübingen during the summer was the Stocherkahnrennen. This was a boat race done with the Stocherkahn boats. A huge amount of people came to watch it happen in the Neckar river.

My favourite place in Tübingen was the old town. I heard Tübingen being called “a fairytale town” because of its beautiful old town. I would agree with this since the old town was stunning. In Tübingen, there are student dormitories in different parts of the city. The one where I lived, WHO, is the biggest one. I would recommend it as a place to stay. The location was convenient because there were many buses going frequently in the area. Most of the friends I made in Tübingen also lived in WHO and that was convenient.

Courses

Tübingen differs from Skövde in the sense that there is not really a single campus in the city. Instead, there are university buildings in different locations all over the city. My neuroscience courses took place in lecture halls and seminar rooms at the university hospital. In addition to neuroscience, I took a German language course, and that took place in the city center.
A thing I struggled with mainly before the exchange was all the paperwork that needed to be done. I had no knowledge in German before the exchange, and this made doing the paperwork harder since a lot of it was in German. In spite of this, everything went well in the end. The courses I took in Tübingen were master level courses. Because of this, the studies were quite challenging since in Skövde, I’m only a Bachelor’s student. I was able to do half of the spring semester’s courses in Skövde before the exchange though because the summer semester in Tübingen started only in April. This was good since it lowered the pressure I had in Tübingen regarding studies.
Overall, I would definitely recommend doing an exchange in Tübingen!

Pictures

Me in the old town in Tübingen.

The Neckar River in Tübingen and the big event, Stocherkahnrennen.

The places I visited during my exchange: Innsbruck in Austria, Zürich in Switzerland, and Strasbourg in France.

My room in Tübingen.