A Year Since Munich

A talk I went to out of curiosity

A year ago today I landed in Munich to start an Erasmus semester at the TUM. Nobody had asked me to do it, and a few months before that I was not even sure I wanted to.

It started with the usual talk our university gives about exchange programmes. I went mostly out of curiosity, without any real plan to apply for anything. They went through the options, Erasmus among them, and over the next few days the idea kept coming back until I ended up asking myself the simplest version of the question: why not try it?

I did not know where, though. Going through the list of universities, two stood out: Munich and Lausanne. I was fairly sure Lausanne was out of reach, so in my head it came down to Munich or nothing. If Munich worked out, good. If not, I would stay in Valencia and nothing would be lost.

Munich said yes, and from then on everything started moving. There was a visa to get, with all the paperwork that comes with it, the usual bureaucracy of these exchanges, and flights. The hardest part was the flat: my flatmate, a classmate from UPV who was going too, and I spent a long time searching across several websites before we found one. I set the flight for the 30th of September, a few days before the semester, to have some time to explore the city first. And sooner than I expected, the day arrived.

Expectations, and one fear

I had high expectations about the people I was going to meet. The TUM has a reputation, and I wanted to see what the students there were like, and also explore Bavaria, which from everything I had read was famous for its nature.

The fear was the other side of the same thing. I was afraid of not being at the level of everyone else, of falling behind and having a much harder time academically than I had planned for.

A different kind of university

I studied Informatics subjects, and in the end I took four: Computer Vision, Efficient Algorithms and Data Structures, Semantics, and Applied Deep Learning for Medicine. It was the year that counted as my fourth year of the degree, from October to February.

The first difference was freedom. You build your own semester from the courses you like, as long as you meet the credit requirements, and some of those courses have enormous groups. The second one took me longer to notice, and it mattered more. Every ECTS credit assumes a number of hours of work at home, and at UPV you can often get by doing the minimum. At the TUM you cannot. In many UPV courses we solve exercises together in class; at the TUM you were expected to arrive at the session with every exercise already done, and the session was only for questions about the solutions.

The course I enjoyed the most was Applied Deep Learning for Medicine, which was a practical course rather than a lecture. It was a real project, at a real scale, and it was the first time I saw what I had been studying in other subjects actually being applied. At UPV most course projects are small and manageable. This one took us months: we used the university’s cluster to train Stable Diffusion and Latent Diffusion models, generated images, and trained a classifier with ConvNeXt. I wish there were more courses like it, ones that are genuinely hands-on.

The presentation

If I had to keep one moment from the whole semester, it would be the day we presented the projects of that practical course. It was the end point of months of work, all of it on one screen for a few minutes, and afterwards the PhD students who had been supervising the course gave us their feedback. Hearing people who do this for a living go through what we had built, what worked and what they would question, was one of the most interesting parts of the whole experience. It was the closest I had come to seeing what research in this field actually looks like from the inside.

The exams I failed

The same semester, I failed some exams.

The reason is not complicated. I did not put in the effort it needed. Between wanting to see more of Munich and everything that was going on around me, and working at the same time, I never found the hours to study and review the way I should have. When the exams came, there was simply too much to fit in my head in too little time.

The fear I arrived with was about not being good enough. What actually happened was simpler than that: I did not put in the hours. It frustrated me at first, but with time I accepted it. In the end, since my average in the Computing branch at UPV was a pass, the equivalent subjects were recognised and I did not have to sit the resits.

What I find hard to separate, looking back, is that the thing that cost me those exams is also most of what I remember. The weekends out, the lakes, the walks through a city I did not know yet. I would not trade those. I would just try to make room for both.

Ordinary days

For the first three days we stayed in a hotel, until we could move into the flat, and we spent them walking around: Marienplatz, the Englischer Garten, Starnberger See. I knew a bit of German from a course I had taken in my second year, but everyone in Munich speaks English perfectly well, so communicating was never a problem.

After that, the days became quiet and fairly routine. Depending on the day, I would take the S-Bahn to Marienplatz and then the U-Bahn to class. In the afternoon I did my shift for work, at the time with EBHealth3, either sitting at some table in the faculty or back at home. I spent time with other Erasmus students, but most of it was with my flatmate.

In the building that became our base at the TUM, there was always an NB Miata parked outside, and more than once I stopped just to look at it. Munich is full of cars I had only ever seen in pictures, and somewhere in those months I stopped seeing cars as just a way of getting from A to B. That shift ended up somewhere I did not expect.

On weekends I tried to walk somewhere new. My favourite place in the city was, and still is, the Englischer Garten.

Outside the city

Outside Munich I went to Starnberger See, to Schliersee and from there on to Tegernsee, and later, with the exams over, to Herzogstand and Eibsee. The two that stayed with me are Starnberger See, for how beautiful and calm it is, and Herzogstand, for the views, and because it was the first real hike of that kind I had ever done.

I also think it woke something up that has not gone back to sleep. A few months after coming home, one Sunday, I booked a trip to Trieste for the next day, on my own and without much of a plan. I do not think I would have done that before Munich.

A year later

What I learned, mostly, is that I underestimated the whole thing before that talk. Sometimes the riskier decisions, the ones you make without being sure how they will turn out, end up being the ones that give you the most, or at least the ones that change you and the way you see things the most.

If I could say something to myself on the 30th of September of 2025, it would be to get out of Munich more, even more than I did, and to enjoy every trip as much as possible. But also not to lose sight of the academic side.

And I would do it again, without thinking twice.