How long does a master’ s degree take in Switzerland?

Here in Switzerland you get a bachelor’ s degree in two years and three years later a master’ s. Usually, people stop at a master’ s, but if you want to go on for a Ph. D. , that takes another four years. Most people stay in one subject, so you need to decide the direction you want to take after high school. There are required core courses for bachelor’ s and master’ s programs. My university is a technical university, so the core courses are the same for everybody—computer science, mathematics, physics, mechanics and so on. For students specializing in computer science, there is another set of required courses that we call basic computer science. Completing these takes two years. At that point, you can choose a specialty in one of the four areas—system software, information technology, hardware or theoretical computer science. For students doing Ph. D. , the program is mostly fixed in the first four semesters. During the next two years, you can choose up to 90 percent of what you want to study. There’ s a booklet of about 50 courses from which to choose. I think computer science education in Switzerland is particularly good in that it is quite wide-ranging, from theoretical computer science and mathematical computer science to databases and computer systems. It’ s possible that there’ s more emphasis in the U. S. on applied Information Technology because in America, there are more grants available for basic research at the Ph. D. level from the companies or the U. S. government. This is not the case here. We normally get our money from the state, and we are restricted to applied research.