Study / My Experience of Studying in Poland [8]

Sorry for the late reply, I was busy with work and exams.

First Answer

I speak very limited Chinese, at level HSK4. However, I am fluent in Spanish and English. In my opinion, knowing Chinese is not that important in Poland. There are some universities such as Uniwersytet SWPS that offers Asian language courses including Chinese and Korean. There are many Local Poles who major in a specific Asian language, but every single one of them continues to do their Masters in either Poland or East Asia. The most interesting thing that I have found about Asian faculties in Poland is that, the Professors who teach Asian languages are White Poles. You read that correctly, so you have a Native European who teaches Asian languages at the University. I met lots of Poles who are very fluent in Chinese.

When it comes to job hunting, English and German are in higher demand compared to Chinese. Being completely fluent in English and Chinese, in my opinion, is not enough to land you a good paying job. You still need other set of skills in order to make a living in Poland with your Chinese language skill, perhaps a sales experience, project management, or even a software development skill and land your job at Huawei. There are lots of Chinese expats in Poland doing corporate jobs in finance, marketing, IT, etc.

Maybe it's a bit stereotypical, but all Poles that I've met, who speak fluent Chinese, either work as language teachers, customer service, or translator. If you're lucky enough you can get a project management job, a Chinese friend of mine who speaks horrible English and does not know any Polish got a job in software localisation for Chinese speakers earning 40 Zloty per hour.

Second Answer

My major is Electrical Engineering, in Poland they refer to power systems, renewable energy, high voltage, motor design. So it's a different department with different curriculum.

students.pw.edu.pl/PDF/M.Sc.%20Telecommunications.pdf

Above is the curriculum for telecomminications engineering.

First, you need to know that applying this university is such a painful process because they require you to submit them tons of documents. I finished my high school and undergrad in Canada, and I had to submit them ridiculous documents including proof of English language proficiency and MSc eligibility statement. The problem is that my university in Canada, refused to issue such documents because they already have a list of documents that they can provide such as academic transcript, confirmation of graduation, etc. However, the Polish University does not care about it, although you have received an acceptance letter from the faculty of your choice, they still require you to submit all documents or they would not provide you with the final acceptance letter. Pretty much I had to contact the education minister in my local province and explained the situation, they contacted my university and fortunately I received all the required documents.

The International Student Office works very slow. It took them 2 months to verify my tuition payment. They're very understaffed, the system is outdated, and the bureaucracy in Poland is like the Soviet Union era. You have to wait for 2-3 hours to get your student card, you need to submit all paper documents in person. It applies to University and applying for Karta Pobytu. The administrators in this University are extremely rude unlike North America. If you want to study in this university, my suggestion is for you to submit all documents as soon as possible so that you have enough time to apply for VISA and everything. Once you get here, also submit application for Karta Pobytu because the process can take up to 8 months.

The level of difficulty depends merely on what electives you want to take. Many students take easy engineering electives where you can skip all classes with no exam, you just need to write a 20-30 pages essay and get an A in the course. Some electives are extremely hard such as data analysis, programming courses, and you need to put lots of efforts, coding, writing reports, and study from lectures to actually pass the course. Some electives are not related to engineering at all, but it's a business course teaching you about teamwork and it's easy to get an A. Some engineering electives have easy exams, only multiple choices, some engineering courses have complex calculations and you can take any textbook or paper or material you want but you still fail the exam just like North American universities.

So the overall quality really depends on which electives you want to take. If you want to learn something valuable in Poland, then you need to select courses based on the professor, take programming courses and technical engineering courses and apply those in real life. If you just want to party and get a MSc degree, then you can just take non-engineering electives, skip all classes and just write a 20 pages essay and pass the course. In some of my courses, I am in the only non-Polish student in the whole class, but these courses are in English.

You also have some options on doing a MSc project and thesis. You can do a thesis that is really easy just to get the degree, or you can do a difficult thesis such as power system protection. I'm doing a project for the application of AI in power systems and it's so much work and I have to read and code a lot.

Really, the overall impression would vary for each person depending on what electives he takes, his thesis, project, etc.