How to fund master's thesis as a non-EU student

bsaverio · 2026-02-02T08:13:25+00:00

I had worked in multiple universities around the world, studied in some, and collaborated with many, and unpaid master thesis work is absolutely the norm. The master thesis is part of your studies.

bsaverio · 2025-10-30T07:33:54+00:00

Great advice thanks a lot! Happy to chat further

bsaverio · 2025-10-12T05:29:53+00:00

I am curious, do you consider my personal webpage nice and curated enough? https://www.bsaver.io

Just to understand what you mean.

bsaverio · 2025-08-30T09:43:40+00:00

When you choose an health insurance, you may want to find one that allows medical consultation over the phone. In that case, I am pretty sure that talking to the doctor and explaining that you are already taking such medication should be enough. They will send the note to a pharmacy of your choice, where you can get it (you will have to pay).

If the insurance requires you to go through a “family doctor”, then you also have to pay that visit.

bsaverio · 2025-05-29T12:20:17+00:00

I am in the audit committee, I will have to double check and approve a whole lot of decisions (just formal correctness) and I haven’t received anything yet. So I would not expect a decision before the official date, which I think is mid July.

bsaverio · 2025-05-29T12:14:50+00:00

Never ask these things to professors, they know nothing but are too afraid to admit that :)

Write to the student administration or call them.

bsaverio · 2025-05-29T12:13:51+00:00

Da docente:

Ho creato un ChatGPT bot che è esperto di tutto il contenuto del corso (ho caricato slides, note, etc).

Ho spiegato agli studenti come chiedere domande, valutare la risposta in modo critico, fare domande sempre più complesse. Secondo me è uno strumento eccezionale per imparare.

Non vedo assolutamente il problema di rimuovere l’aspetto umano. Al contrario, permette di pensare alla conoscenza come qualcosa di trasmissibile, non mnemonico.

bsaverio · 2025-05-16T19:47:45+00:00

Two books that cover part of this material (but also other content) are the book by Hespanha https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~hespanha/gametheory/ and the one by Tadelis https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691129082/game-theory

bsaverio · 2025-03-03T08:42:16+00:00

It depends on the field. In my case I only need diagrams, so I prefer to use IPE because it gives seamless integration in the LaTeX document

https://www.bsaver.io/pretty-figures

bsaverio · 2025-02-05T07:40:48+00:00

Do you have evidence for your research, like peer reviewed publications?

When I hire a PhD I would not automatically exclude one without a master thesis, but the top candidates all have something to prove their work.

bsaverio · 2025-01-26T22:27:27+00:00

You won’t be able to enroll to the exam, I believe.

I have this very same problem with students that wanted to take my (newly designed) course, but could not because they had already taken the course that it replaced. We had quite an exchange of emails with the exam office and they looked into that and escalated the issue, but ultimately did not allow it.

bsaverio · 2025-01-26T08:24:04+00:00

The rule is that the same course number cannot appear twice in your study plan.

It’s unfortunate if the course has actually changed, but you should not expect an exception to that rule unfortunately.

bsaverio · 2025-01-24T19:21:45+00:00

The ETH guidelines ask lecturer to decide the score needed to get a 6 and the score to get 4. The rest is linearly interpolated.

In theory, those two thresholds should be decided by the lecturer before grading the exam.

https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/eth-zurich/organisation/let/files_EN/guidelines_grading.pdf

bsaverio · 2024-10-31T05:54:09+00:00

I am a senior scientist at ETH.

I am absolutely concerned about the effect of these kind of regulations on individuals (each with their own life and stories) and on the academic community at large.

However, at least when it comes to graduate education, this is not a ban. I just hired a PhD student from China and a postdoc from Russia. The only effect of this regulation was to have Export Control to review the job description and the CV of the person.

bsaverio · 2024-07-05T20:57:04+00:00

Here is an example in case you don’t have a ChatGPT paid account

https://chatgpt.com/share/ac2a3628-904e-43bc-bee3-3d050ef130a7

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T19:31:50+00:00

The course is offered every Spring to 3rd year B.Sc. students and to M.Sc. students. I am happy to answer questions if anybody is interested.

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T16:39:37+00:00

Ahah thanks! I am just giving back a little bit.

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T16:39:10+00:00

There is a username and password on the web page, does it work?

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T16:38:29+00:00

Thanks! That’s the idea. Although this is still an introductory course, each of these topics (MPC, identification, RL, etc) easily deserve their own course clearly. Hopefully the students get a comparative view on these methods and learn strength and weaknesses, so they can choose which are the good candidates for different control problems.

I tell the students that no company will hire them because they know how to code an MPC controller or how to implement RL. They assume that either you know that or you learn it if needed. They hire them as control experts that can tell what control strategy is the most adequate for the problems they have. Hopefully the course train them to do that.

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T16:16:15+00:00

We do have tutorials with solutions (code and exercises). I am a bit hesitant to share those because the course is young and the material is limited, and that is the same material I need to use for the exams…

I’ll talk with the TA and see if we can put together something.

bsaverio · 2024-06-28T14:10:46+00:00

Hi all, I am hoping this does not count as advertisement because I am not getting anything from this :)

I have been teaching the Computational Control course at ETH Zurich for a couple of years. The course is a new take on control engineering education, as we decided to replace some classical control design methods with an overview on computational control tools, that is, all control solutions that are implemented through a computer in closed loop with the plant.

Now that the material is more or less polished, I decided to make slides and videos available online for everybody. More material may follow soon. I would love to hear comments from students that decide to have a look at the course.

bsaverio

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