A Retrospective on Studying/Living in Switzerland

I attended ETH Zurich (ETH from now on for brevity) for my Master's in Robotics from 2021 to 2023; I've been back in Canada for a few months and am a matter of days of moving to the states for work, and my list of notes I've accumulated over the past couple years isn't getting any fresher, so with some further ado, a jumble of thoughts about living and studying in Switzerland.

First, a pretty huge disclaimer: I was there as a student, and interacted majoritarily with other international students (I had some Swiss roommates, but they were a minority), so my experience, at least on a social level, will probably not reflect that of anyone who immigrated for work. The student lifestyle is, of course, also quite different to what you would get when working, so some facets of work-life balance or activities might differ as well. Finally, I visited my partner in the states on occasion, so this isn't two years in Switzerland, every month start-to-finish, but more of a "mostly two years". Overall, I wouldn't extrapolate too hard if you're not there as a student.

Some of the notes below apply more to the German-speaking cantons than Italian- or French-speaking ones (never properly visited Graubünden, so no comments there); for example, trains in the French-speaking cantons have the reputation for being less punctual, and the public bathrooms in Ticino seemed a little less nice as well.

I've some logistic notes at the very bottom, such as getting a visa, resources for finding a place to stay, and the procedure for leaving the country, with lots of links.

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Living in Switzerland

Cost

Switzerland lives up to the hype; c'est ben chère. How painful these numbers are is of course highly dependant on where you come from, but while I was living there, CHF 1 was about 1.30 CAD. My rent, in an apartment with six other students, was approximately CHF 600 per month. Food was CHF 300-400, depending on whether I ate meat that month. A transit pass for the main zones of Zürich was CHF 62 when I was under 25, and CHF 87 afterwards. Eating at the ETH or UZH (University of Zürich) Mensa (cafeteria) costed CHF 6.50 and CHF 5.80, although these have gone up a little since. 33dl of local cider costed about CHF 7 (it's oh so worth it though, they're not overly sweet like ciders I typically find in Canada). I once paid CHF 6.40 for a sweet potato. My health insurance (Swisscare) costed CHF 130 per month (CHF 300 deductible per year, no dental), and my liability insurance about that per year.

On the bright side, my phone plan was only CHF 10 per month! And at least compared to North America, tuition is a downright bargain, at CHF 804 per semester.

Overall, the CHF 21 000 requirement (see bottom) is there for a reason; you're looking at CHF 13000 per as the bare minimum; add any trains to go hiking, buying a bike, maybe your laptop breaks, you need new clothes, heck, you want to visit home; that number can go way up.

Tangential, but I was shocked to come back to Canada to find that grocery prices seem to have caught up with Switzerland.

Language

I got my residence permit, bank account, and SwissPass account without any issues in English (they switched pretty quickly when they heard my broken German). Train attendants seem to be polyglots. Most university staff speak English too, as do most younger people. I've found outside that, it's a little bit of a mixed bag, with less people speaking English in smaller towns or rural areas, and more in Zürich itself. Overall, the German classes UZH offers are very much worth it (see bottom).

Public Transportation

Public transit in Switzerland, coming from Canada at least, is a dream. Zürich itself has has buses, trams, and trains, as well as rentable bikes and scooters, giving plenty of options for getting from point A to point B. Looking at the broader country, most places are very well connected by trains, with buses typically providing last-mile service to little mountain hamlets or trailheads; there are some spots that are only accessible by car or have limited access times or dates, but these seem pretty uncommon. You can buy tickets for individual routes through the SBB app, or just swipe on Easy Ride, and it'll automatically calculate the cost of your route at the end (if you're in a city and hit the cost of a day pass, it'll stop charging you too!). There's no need to scan a ticket, you just get on, saving loads of time compared to Ottawa, where a bus during rush hour can take a few minutes to load. Be warned if planning to take advantage of their trust: attendants, in uniform or camouflaged, will occasionally appear to check your tickets, and the fines increase each time you are caught. I've overheard them shaming people for not paying too, which is pretty funny and well deserved.

Best of all, transit is punctual, oh so punctual. I would sometimes have transfers of a minute or two and by golly we'd make it. I have become so accustomed to everything being on time that when I came home, I was ready to leave a bus stop after it was ten minutes late because I assumed it had broken down or the route was closed for the day.

The one exception to this was leaving the German-speaking chunk of the country; the trains in the French-speaking cantons were much more remniscent of home, although my sample size was quite small.

Besides punctuality, the trains and buses are clean and quiet, and of course the views are just stellar.

One of my favorite bits of taking public transit was getting on a little PostBus to go up a winding mountain road, someone wearing casual clothing getting on, then once the bus started moving, whipping out the classic red phone and checking tickets. Sneaky indeed.

Public transit is expensive, but there are some options to mitigate this. The GA lets you travel anywhere, any time at no cost, beyond the cost of the GA itself. Unfortunately, this is a really hard sell, as it costs CHF 4000 per year, with a minimum term of 6 months. I had a rough semester and spent a lot of time hiking to avoid responsibilities, and just managed to come out even with the Halbtax, so unless you're taking a train two hours each way every weekend, it probably won't be worth it. This brings us to the way: the halbtax, which cuts the cost of all trains in half (almost all, I think there are some scenic routes that don't accept it, but I never took those, so no clue). Costing CHF 190 per year, you need to visit Säntis/Wasserauen five times, or Lauterbrunnen twice for this to pay itself off; if you plan to traipse your way around Switzerland at all while there (and I certainly hope you do!), the halbtax is easily worth the cost.

Bathrooms

I have a particular hatred of North American bathrooms; they have ridiculous gaps in the doors, and people have no respect for others and will do terrible things to the porcelain throne. I must therefore commend Switzerland for their exceptional bathrooms, sporting at the very least no gaps on the sides of doors, and sometimes even floor-to-ceiling doors, oh my! Unlike North America, Swiss toilets tend to use buttons instead of sensors, so no faulty triggers. They also tend to have a little sanitizer spray for cleaning the seat before and after you use it. Public ones do cost money, so I'd recommend keeping a couple francs on you just in case. Finally, people tend to destroy toilets in Switzerland much less as well.

A small PSA: as per the signs you'll see around campus, please brush the toilet after you use it!

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Living in Zürich

A collection of misc notes about various facets of living in Zürich.

Architecture

Zürich has what I want to call a nice balance between residential and commercial buildings; while there are single-family homes, especially up on the hills, the city core itself is very much three-four-five story buildings with apartments, the main floor typically occupied by businesses. Either parkades are incredibly stealthy, or most parking is underground, getting rid of lots of the giant concrete wastelands plaguing Canadian cities. I'm not sure how to describe the architectural style itself, but you can look up some pictures of Zürich to get an idea; overall, I like it, it feels very functional. The skyline is dotted with red cranes; I could have sworn someone developed an app to remove them, but I'm finding zilch online about this. In any case, it's a city, things change.

Grocery Stores

Grocery stores are in abundance; there was, within a ten minute bus ride of where I last lived in Affoltern/Höngg, two Migros, two Coop, Maxim, Aldi, and Lidl. Within a five minute walk, there was a Coop Pronto. I felt the area I lived in in Albisrieden was equally well connected. It resulted in more small shopping trips, getting an odd item here and there on the way back from ETH or when I wanted to go for a short walk, instead of the huge once-a-week trips we typically did in Canada living in the suburbs.

The Swiss grocery stores (Migros and Coop) tend to be more expensive than the others, but also tend to be larger and have more selection; there is a non-intersection between them and grocery stores like Maxim that offer non-western food. I've also found some weird gaps in what they carry, such as Migros not having semi-sweet or white chocolate. I will gladly forgive them this for the excellent their chickory root-based coffee substitute, and freshly warmed Hercules Brot and Holzfällerbrot helles mehl.

A side-note: I felt as though produce went bad the second it left the store in Switzerland, versus back home, where apples stood a chance of surviving a week without withering away. Perhaps there's some Big Produce cartel in Switzerland ensuring everything goes bad, forcing you to buy more, or we're injecting our produce in North America with some kind of radioactive last-long juice. Either way, the buy-little-often mentality worked around this well enough.

Most stores, grocery stores included, close at 8pm on weekdays, and are closed on Sundays entirely. If you need something, you'll need to go to the Zürich main station (HB) and shop there, or to a Migrolino or Coop Pronto.

Vehicles

G-Wagons, G-Wagons everywhere; stock, souped up, it seems like every second person has one. I'm not quite sure where they're making use of that fancy snorkel, especially on a 100k vehicle. You'll also see five black hatchbacks all in a row waiting at a light. And funny little single-person cars. The larger semi trucks all have flat fronts. I assume none of these are a surprise to most people from adjacent countries, but coming from a land of massive SUVs and trucks, the vehicles felt cute.

Water Fountains

Zürich has over 1200 public fountains you can drink from, often decorated in unique ways, sometimes abstract art, sometimes more traditional, sometimes a dog or a deer. Regardless, there's not much need to carry a water bottle when walking around.

Church bells

This is a Switzerland-wide thing, but church bells go off every quarter hour, one ding per quarter, then again on the hour, a number of times equal to the hour. So at 9pm, you'll get four dings indicating it's an hour, and nine dings indicating it's 9. These also start at 7am in Affoltern at least, and run on weekends; for a country with fairly strict noise ordinances, this feels a little ironic, and probably one of the big cons of living in Switzerland (covered later)

Cleanliness

When I first arrived, I was blown away at how clean everything was. Sure, there was the occasional trash, but compared to Canada, it felt pristine. After a couple years, I became accustomed to it and began to notice the trash more, the cigarette butts strewn about. There were garbage bins every few meters in bustling public spaces like the waterfront and a reasonable amount every where, but that didn't stop a lot of people from just dumping trash right in front of them instead of in them. I definitely noticed it more downtown, such as around HB, but there were still loose items caught in bushes around my apartment. That said, coming back to Canada, and especially visiting the Bay Area reinforced that it was still leaps and bounds better than North America.

I discussed the trash situation with one of my Swiss roommates, and they said they're not convinced Swiss people are more clean, and instead that cleanup crews are very active, which I've definitely noticed.

Random Vibes

Random things that didn't make it into their own categories, hopefully helping set the stage a little. Grandparents walking babies in strollers. Cat ladders hanging from third story apartments to let them down to the ground. In nice weather, people congregating beside the rivers and lakes to have lunch. Little kids walking hand in hand with their orange vests on the way to school. Playgrounds stuffed full of families, petting zoos, garden patches up the hills.

Favorite places

I've heard more than a couple people say that Zürich just isn't very interesting as a city, describing it more like a big village. As far as tourism goes, I have to agree; if you're coming to visit, I would give it a day, hit Niederdorf, and dip out to the mountains (I am also biased by being a little less city-interested than nature-interested, in general). That said, I absolutely loved living Zürich, and I think it still has a lot to offer, my favorite bits of which I'll share; I've added some images as well here.

When I lived in Albisrieden, I loved walking or running up Uetliberg. Massive trees that dwarfed those in Ontario, beautiful paths, properly away from the hustle and bustle of the city, steep enough for a solid workout, and beautiful views of Zürich and the alps when you get to the top. Having it nearby was amazing.

I moved after the first year to Affoltern and was lucky enough to have Käferberg in my backyard. My path up the hill first passed through one of the communal gardens, which grew just about everything you could imagine during the summer. Grapes, raspberries, apples, pumpkins, sunflowers, brussel sprouts; I was shocked to see everything short of tropical fruits. After the gardens were the trails, which, while not getting as far away from roads and houses as Uetliberg, are still in a proper forest. In the spring, sheep and lambs graze beside the trail, there were rabbit hutches nearby, and there are deer near Waid. There's also the occasional badger (late at night), cat, or bird of prey. Blackberries and raspberries grown on the slopes too, perfect for a nibble while on a walk, while waves of corn cover the fields near Hönggerberg. Of course, there are stellar views of Zürich and the alps from Aussichtspunkt Waid. The hill has open meeting spaces and BBQ pits, which will be full of families and get-togethers; more in the summer, but still a surprising number during the winter, regardless of the occasional foot-deep dump of snow.

More in the city are the UZH botanical gardens, the Alter Botanischer Garten downtown and Botanischer Garten der Universität Zürich on the east coast of the Zürichsee, which are lovely little green sanctuaries with a beautiful diversity of plants to admire.

During the summer, you can swim in the Limmat at Schwimmbad Oberer Letten, or in the lake near the Zürichhorn, which also gives spectacular alpine views when the weather is right. These will both be busy and bustling after work hours, with everyone swimming and sunbathing in the green spaces, lots of stalls for food and ice cream, and lots of public drinking (responsibly; I've only seen someone properly inebriated once or twice).

Niederdorf (the old section of Zürich to the east of the Limmat, at the mouth of the Zürichsee) is a classic recommendation, with old buildings, cobblestone streets, fun stores, and lots and lots of tourists. Beware the ten million fondu and raclette restaurants.

A silly little hidden gem is the Schanzengrabenpromenade, between Lagerstrasse and Sihlstrasse, which is an adorable shaded walkway beside a quick-moving crystal-clear river that will be full of surprisingly large fish and ducks during the summer; it's just a nice spot to stop and eat lunch.

The Sukkulenten-Sammlung Zürich (Collection of Succulents when translated directly) is a cute little collection of greenhouses and outdoor gardens on the west coast of the lake that has a silly number of plants, both arid and humid. This could maybe be combined with a visit to the Lindt factory, which was surprisingly informative, for a day trip.

In terms of stores/restaurants, I can recommend four.

The first is Markthalle IM VIADUKT, which is a market with lots of cute little stalls, including one dedicated to pie, another that sells different beers and ciders (a great place to try out different local drinks), a British one (yes, run by a British couple), one that sells fun tortellini combos (don't mention that you intend to put tomato sauce on it, they will berate you then recommend browned butter instead ;)), a cheese shop, a cured meats shop, and so much more. I wish I had more time and way more money to go back and try everything I missed.

Second is Little Fish, which is a tiny little sushi takeout store that has (for Zürich) very reasonably priced sushi and soups; there's one right beside ETH.

While I'm looking forward to the exceptional quantity and quality of eastern food in the bay, I will miss the döner kepap; on occasion, I would stop by Bahnhof Kebap & Pizza when passing through Oerlikon on the way back from a day of hiking, and it was amazing every time. I just asked for everything, minus the tomato.

Finally, there's 2nd Peak, my not-so-secret addiction. It's a second-hand outdoor gear store that has a little bit of everything, for prices that are still pretty bad by Canadian standards, but downright steals in Switzerland. I may or may not have gone every few weeks to see if some item I'm looking for had shown up.

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Hiking

The Trade-Off

Switzerland is hiking heaven, with one caveat: you'll never properly get away from civilization. It's hard to find a place that doesn't have a city or hamlet visible, or that doesn't have a herd of cows or sheep crossing the trail. In the really popular places, there'll of course be crowds of tourists, and especially in places that have lots of mountain huts such as around Zermatt, the buzz of helicopters carrying supplies is persistent. Lots of popular mountains have cable cars to the top, so you can hike for five hours and arrive at the summit to a massive building with restaurant, hotel, and swarms of tourists.

That said, if you're willing to stray from the popular routes and mountains, to take a PostBus up to some inconspicuous trailhead, or ride a locally-operated-cash-only-call-in-advance cable car, you can find hikes that only have a local or two on them, and are more than beautiful.

(of course, if you don't want to/can't do a particular hike, but still want the views from the top, taking a cable car up is totally valid, and you can look down smugly at the hikers as they trudge their way up)

Beauty

I think it's redundant to say that Switzerland is beautiful; open whatever map software, choose a random mountain, and it'll be gorgeous. My Photos section also has pictures from every hike I did in Switzerland, and hopefully reinforces this further. The well known areas, such as Jungfrau/Lauterbrunnen, Säntis, and Zermatt are obviously gorgeous, but so is just about everywhere else: Pizol, Chaiserstock, Hoch Fulen, Bockmattli, Rigi Hochflue; I can't say I ever hiked a route that was disappointing. They're all stunning. Fields of hip-high wild grass and flowers, cow and sheep pastures dotted with massive moss-coated boulders, couples sitting on grassy knolls atop cliffs overlooking the rolling hills below, drinking wine and reading books, lush green hills dusted with a fine topping of powder snow, stunning blue glacial lakes, waterfalls, clear streams, young mountains not yet worn down by time, glaciers, clear skies and fluffy snow-covered peaks, mountain huts nestled into little outcrops and valleys. The beauty isn't restricted to the hike; I would typically put my phone away once we were a bit outside of Zürich because the scenery itself was gorgeous, winding through rolling green hills, fields of cows, cats roaming the slopes, and gradually, the alps getting closer and closer until you're surrounded by jagged peaks and stunning lakes. For example, the route between Luzern and Interlaken is positively gorgeous, as is the approach to Säntis/Wasserauen. And Altdorf. And Walenstadt. And Innerthal. And pretty much all the others.

I loved living in Switzerland for so many reasons, but having some of the world's most beautiful scenery on my doorstep tops the list, and it makes me sad knowing that I likely won't have that again.

Trail Maintenance/Markings

As well as being incomparably gorgeous, hiking routes are also exceptionally well marked and maintained. You'll find painted markers on rocks along the trail indicating where to go, and these have always been well maintained and logically spaced. There are also signs indicating which direction you must go to get to a certain destination, as well as estimated times to complete the route. Cable or ladder sections are likewise well maintained and feel sturdy.

Difficulty

Speaking of cables or ladders, there's a good diversity of difficulty for different skill/comfort levels. Trails are divided into six difficulty classes, which are then clumped into three levels of visual markers on trails: yellow markers are easy (T1) hikes which are almost a road, nothing technical or sketchy, white-red-white (T2-T3) are medium hikes that can have exposure, ladders, and rope sections, and white-blue-white (T4-T5) take it up a notch with more exposure, more verticality, more loose scrambling. Of course, if you want something more extreme, there's proper alpinism, although I never did this (another regret).

Anothe component of difficulty besides the terrain itself is altitude. In the Sierra Nevada or Rockies, your hike can start at an elevation of 2500m (such as the Mount Whitney Trailhead or town of Mammoth Lakes) and go up to as high as 4400m at the summit of Mount Whitney (that's hiking, not alpinism!). Most hikes I did in northern Switzerland started at an elevation somewhere between 500m and 1000m, and went as high at 2500m-3000m (although there are plenty of options that don't go so high!), so thin air and acclimitization is much less of a concern. It's possible to hit the altitude sickness threshold on the few hikes that go above 3000m (and of course depending on personal limits), but since these are generally the very summit of the hike, you're usually not that high for long.

Animals

Lots of routes pass through farmland lower down, and so you'll often spend the beginning and end of a hike picking your way around cowpies; once you get higher, this might transition to fields of sheep, and the landmine avoidance continues (the cow phase can sometimes be avoided with a cable-car to a higher start of a hike). Get even higher, and you'll find mountain goats, skittish little buggers on the Brienzer Rothorn, and completely indifferent on Pizol or around Chamonix. Once you're properly up in the mountains, you'll still hear the faint ringing of cowbells from far below echoing up the slopes, a constant, if not distant, companion, occassionally sprinkled with the church bells announcing the time. On the way down, you may get lucky and pass a field of llamas. Especially around popular areas like the Lauterbrunnen valley, but sprinkled a little everywhere, you may stumble upon a fridge that has been left out with a sign telling you to leave your money in a little caisse; the fridge will typically be stuffed with local cured meats, yoghurt, milk, cheese, and jams.

The Swiss

I thought I was in shape before coming to Switzerland. I quickly discovered that the Swiss are just built different. Groups of them would pass me at a breakneck speed, chatting away like they weren't even moving. Little kids were doing T5 hikes. At one point on Säntis, a couple with a baby on their back didn't want to wait for the queue at the ladder before the summit to clear up, so they just goat-hopped down beside it, no hands.

Snow

As to be expected, the hiking season isn't infinite, with dangerous levels of snow on Säntis (2500m) by October, and thick snow still on lower mountains such as Gross Aubrig (1700m) at the beginning of May. There are plenty of brushed routes in the winter for cross country skiing and snow-shoeing. If you do want to take another route, there's plenty of information to help you stay safe, such as snow depth maps and avalanche bulletins which are updated daily.

Tools/Apps

I can highly recommend MeteoSwiss for weather, SwitzerlandMobility for (paid) route planning, and swisstopo for free route planning and maps.

Route Recommendations

Säntis/the Alpstein was easily one of my favorite places to hike. It is relatively close to Zürich (2.5 hours to Wasserauen from Oerlikon), has beautiful spine mountains and lakes, low mountains and rolling hills to the north, the rest of the alps to the south and east, and enough trails to revisit again and again. I went seven times (eight if you count Kronberg), twice to do the full loop from Wasserauen to Säntis and back, twice doing that trip one-way, once hitting the center of the Alpstsein/Fählensee, and twice passing by Säxerlücke. I think I easily could have gone back a few more times for the trails I missed, such as the Altman, Gräppelensee, the western arm of the massif, and the pass by Obere Mans.

The Bernese Oberland/Jungfrau region is another easy sell. It is incontestably one of the most gorgeous parts of the country, with massive 4000m snow-covered peaks, multi-tone glacial lakes, hamlets up on cliffs, and tiered valleys with waterfalls dropping off them to verdant fields below. Lauterbrunnen valley was Tolkien's inspiration for Rivendell, and understandably so. There are cable cars up to just about everywhere, such as the Schilthorn, where James Bond was filmed, or Grindelwald First, which gives stellar views of the bohemoths opposite it, or for those willing to throw over CHF 100 at transit (I never was), you can take a train into the Eiger and come out at the Jungfraujoch. While the Lauterbrunnen valley and Grindelwald bowl themselves are incredibly touristy, there are plenty of options for getting away from the oversized luggage and designer clothes. The valleys at the south end offer a bunch of hikes, and I can recommend the round trip from Gimmelwald to the Rotstockhütte, as well as the Mountain View Trail and valley floor for something a little easier. On my To Do list, but sadly never done, are Oeschinensee, Rosenlaui, Dossenhütte, Schmadrihütte, Schwarzhoren, the stretch between Harderkulm and Brienzer Rothorn, and then, of course, every other trail in the area.

The Zermatt region is another obvious one, again plagued by (other ;) ) tourists, but once you get out of the town itself and up into the mountains, the prospect of continuous uphill thins the herds a little. We did a multiday up to Trift and the Platthorn, and I loved it. The whole area is higher elevation, so it's much more arid. This is perhaps sacrilege, but I personally found the Matterhorn less interesting than the still massive peaks we hiked by, with their giant glaciars, waterfalls, and of course, Valois Blacknose Sheep. We didn't take the cable cars up, but I've heard good things about the views from the Gornergrat and Schwarzsee.

Technically in France for most of the trip, but the Tour du Mont Blanc (in particular the west chunk, which is what we did) is beautiful. The Mont Blanc massif absolutely defies scale, the true summit being gigantic yet so far back from its kilometer-shorter subpeaks that they appear to be level, and horizontally it just keeps going, with more sharp and independently impressive mountains jutting out of it. It's worth noting you'll probably need to book some of the more popular huts (such as Refuge Lac Blanc) far in advance.

For slightly less known hikes, Pizol is beautiful, the lakes below it are stunning, and if you're willing to try your hand at a T4, the route up to the summit is also a lot of fun. Rigi Hochflue is a T5- and has some gnarly vertical sections with cables, tree roots, and a ludicrously tall ladder, with stellar views of the lakes to the south and the Mythens to the east. The route up from Biel to Chaiserstock is easily one of my favorites; the cliffs leading up to the mountain itself are imposing and straight out of a movie when wreathed in low clouds, and the final ascent has some fun cable and chain sections. I never got a view from the top that wasn't partially obstructed, but that didn't stop the summits poking through the sea of clouds from being lovely. Both times I went, I passed a couple people at most. The route up to Hoch Fulen and Seewli is pretty arduous, but the views are worth it; the lake is gorgeous, the wall of mountains to the south looming, and the surrounding alps are, as always, beautiful. Closer to home, Gross Aubrig and Chli Aubrig makes for a more laid back day hike with nice views of the alps to the south and, with good weather, Zürichsee to the north. Bockmattli is right next door and makes for a good introduction to winter hiking.

There's of course so many more hikes to do; over 65 000km worth, apparently. Cover your eyes, point somewhere on a map, and it'll likely be a lovely experience.

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The Bad

I've praised Switzerland a lot so far, so lets shift gears to what's less great.

As previously mentioned, the church bells go off every quarter hour, and while some people get used to it, some don't. I sat somewhere in the middle, sometimes sleeping through the night, sometimes woken up at 7am. It's annoying, and a silly contradiction with noise ordinances. I also imagine it's just plain bad for people's health.

Smoking and cigarette butts are impossible to escape. It can be a struggle to find a restaurant patio or bench that isn't close to someone smoking.

Unless you're from further up north (my Icelandic friend was unfazed), the darkness, rain, and cold can be rough. As an exercise, visit your home city's Wikipedia page, then Zürich's; Ottawa gets 2000 sunlight hours per year, Zürich gets 1500. It rains often; it felt like it was nonstop in April and May, with fog, snow, and rain in winter months, and more rain sprinkled (pun intended) throughout the rest of the year. Finally, the cold; it may seem weird to complain about the cold, coming from -20C winters (or -40 with windchill when we were in Winnipeg), but Zürich has wet cold, and it just seeps through all your layers.

This isn't so much "bad" as an observation, but while homelessness definitely felt way less prevalent in Zürich than back home, it was still there, hiding on Langstrasse or Militärstrasse. I've heard that the government offers free housing to the homeless, I've heard that those on the street are unwell or refuse it; I haven't done my research, and won't make a call on the topic, but it was always a little shocking to see someone sleeping on a bench. It just felt so much more out of place than back home.

Another item that isn't actually bad, but I couldn't think of where else to put it; it's tough to find Swiss people to interact with. Most of my classmates seemed to be international. I did have some Swiss roommates, and they told me that Swiss people tend to have friend circles from their childhood, and simply don't have any need for making more later on, so it does make sense I wouldn't stumble into a group of them. That, and being fairly introverted and bogged down with school work probably didn't help.

As far as con lists go, it's pretty small. I really think the church bells, smoking, and weather were my big three gripes living in Switzerland.

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Studying at ETH Zurich

My Education Background

First, a wee bit of context about my education pre-master's; I did a joint degree in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. I loved the dynamics and controls bit of mechanical engineering, was okay with mechanical design, fluids, and thermodynamics, and downright hostile to materials. I absolutely loved the computer science side; the pure, abstract nature of algorithmic problems was a weirdly perfect fit for me, and writing code was just more fun than using SolidWorks. After goofing off with robots through an internship and engineering team, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make them autonomous: how can they see, or navigate, or move? I'd absolutely romanticized the idea of building legged robots that can leap up cliffs like a goat, or follow an owner like a dog. A masters in robotics seemed like the perfect fusion of mechanical engineering and computer science, and ETH Zurich had an amazing sounding robotics program, as well as a research lab that specialized in legged robots (RSL), so it was a perfect fit.

Program Structure

You can find all this information on the program page, but here's the condensed version.

The program consisted of 4 main components:

  1. Internship
  2. Courses
  3. Semester Project
  4. Masters Thesis

I really appreciated how diverse the program was; back home, Masters programs consist of 4-ish courses and then a year long thesis, while the Robotics Masters at ETH let me do a bit of everything, with the number of required credits comes out to around 8 courses, depending on which are taken. The internship is a great chance to apply that knowledge at a company. The semester project is like a mini thesis, meant to be done alongside classes. It's smaller in scale, and we were highly recommended to do it in a different lab than our thesis to gain a greater diversity of experience. Finally, there's the master's thesis, which is done over a semester full time. Overall, I think the program is very well rounded, balancing course-work, industry experience, and research in different labs, all jam-packed into a 1.5-year program (although it'll take me up to the three year limit on the program to finish).

Internship

ETH recommends doing this before starting the masters, I'm doing mine right now, so not following that advice so well...

Courses

Diversity and Hands-On

ETH offers a plethora of courses covering all facets of robotics and adjacent topics, such as vision, controls, simulation, optimization, planning, machine learning, computer graphics, information security, hardware design, and more. There were entry level courses for those taking a topic for the first time, and advanced courses for people who were more familiar with a topic (for example, I was told to skip the basic control theory course since it would just be a rehash of what I learned in undergrad). There was also a little bit of overlap between course: Vision Algorithms for Mobile Robotics (highly recommend) and Image Analysis and Computer Vision (would skip), for example, both covered image filtering and basic processing. It may take some side-by-side comparison and asking around to figure out the optimal arrangement.

I ended up taking 9 courses, covering physics simulations, high performance computing, dynamic programming and optimal control, system modelling and control, computer vision, and machine learning. I wish I had the brains to take more courses because there was just so much more to do and learn.

You can visit the Course Catalogue to see them all; you can filter by semester and the "Robotics, Systems and Control Master" Programme to see the strictly robotics courses, but you can also take courses from the electrical, mechanical, or software programs, leading to an massive number of options. You can also sign up for more courses than you intend to keep, and just deregister from those you don't want to keep after trying it out for a couple weeks.

Courses tend to be very hands-on, with most having programming exercises or projects that very clearly reflect taught theory. Some courses also have the typical hand-math assignments, but having actual implementation projects in just about every class was lovely, if not a little overwhelming when they're all tossing these incredibly cool yet time-consuming assignments at you. We built a visual-odometry pipeline, wrote a full planner for a rocket, accelerated physics simulations using SIMD and OpenMP, impemented dynamic programming, used deep learning for segmentation and identification, controlled legged robots, simulated soft bodies, and more.

Evaluation

The vast majority of your grade for a course (if not 100% of it) comes from the final exam, which is typically closed-book, so studying for them is imperative. Some courses will give you bonus points for completing a major project at the end of the course; the visual odometry pipeline and rocket planner from above both fell into this category, offering a maximum 0.5 grade boost (on a 6.0 scale with 4.0 being a pass) if successfully implemented. I wish I had documented this better, but I think exam lengths can vary quite a bit, from less than an hour to three-ish.

My undergrad university tended to hide their old exams from us, as they reused questions year after year. Most of my ETH courses, in contrast, were more than happy to provide all previous exams, as they successfully thought of new and exotic ways of testing your knowledge of the course theory.

I think I had a few classes with weekly-ish assignments that were evaluated; the rest left the assignments as highly recommended exercises. It made for an interesting dynamic, where all the work during the semester is optional, but at least for me, incredibly useful in preparing for the exam.

Difficulty

I found ETH lived up to its reputation of being difficult. I think there are a couple reasons why it was so tough for me; these might not be universally applicable.

While most course assignments or problem sets I had were optional, I really wanted to do them, both as preparation for the final exam, as well as an opportunity to apply the course content. I mean, heck, why wouldn't I want to build a rendering or odometry pipeline? If you want to complete the degree in the hypothetical 1.5 years, you'll need to take something approaching 30 credits (almost all your course credits) in the first semester and another 8 the second alongside the semester project, which leads to a lot of assignments and projects. I took 30 credits my first semester and really struggled to stay on top of everything at once, leading to submitting some assignments in a less than satisfactory state, lost sleep, and loads of stress. Speaking to other students, lots of them took less credits per semester, stretching their program longer, letting them take more courses overall and at a more sustainable pace. Some also took a reduced course load to join the engineering teams, such as SwissLoop or AMZ Driverless. I was speed-running my degree to avoid accumulating more student debt from living in Switzerland for longer, but ironically, this led to me burning out and losing a semester to brain fog, so I actually ended up taking just as long if not longer to complete my degree, while taking less classes. I'd recommend taking it slow if you can afford it; enjoy the country, explore more courses, and get some sleep.

A second source of difficulty was (self-imposed) lack of collaboration. I think I was particularly lucky in my undergrad program, finding a group of exceptionally smart and hard-working friends in the same program to study with; it makes a huge difference, being able to ask the person beside you for an explanation that takes five minutes, versus spending a day trying to figure something out by yourself. I don't think my inability to find a group like this is a result of other people; I tend to be pretty introverted, and didn't go out of my (very limited way) to find people in my classes to consistently study with. I'm not sure if everyone else had the same experience, and if ETH really is a "do it solo" experience at the Masters level, or if this is a personal failure. Regardless, I can highly encourage finding people you get along with in your classes, who hopefully share more than just that single class, who you can spend time studying with to accelerate both your learning.

Professors

The professors I've had at ETH Zurich are without exception incredibly passionate about the content they're teaching and, with the exception of one professor, excellent lecturers; they present the subject matter in a manner that takes into account our probable lack of previous experience when appropriate, and give sufficient examples to make tough content more comprehensible. There's some topics which I've struggled to understand immensely, but I think it's almost always because it's a topic that requires some time to digest, or I lacked the expected background knowledge to get it right away (see above).

They're also all at the top of their respective fields. Our planning professor founded nuTonomy, a self-driving car spinoff from MIT, which is still around and kicking through Motional. Our dynamic programming professor founded Kiva Systems, known now as Amazon Robotics. Our dynamics professor founded ANYbotics. Our vision algorithms professor founded Zurich Eye, which became Facebook Zurich and was responsible for the SLAM algorithms running on the Oculus Quest, as well as the PX4 autopilot. Our image analysis professor has over 160 000 citations (I know, a terrible metric of excellence) and introduced a few of the go-to algorithms in the field. During lectures, my professors sometimes present their own work because their work is either industry standard or state-of-the-art. There's just such a high concentration of competent researchers here, it's absolutely phenomenal.

Other Students

I'm honestly amazed I made it into ETH. Everyone I interacted with was exceptionally smart with a super-human work ethic. It was inspiring to be around.

No Breaks

ETH semesters are organized such that there's no summer break like in North America; the fall semester is from September to December, then exams are in January, and the spring semester begins in February and continues until May. You'd think May to September would be a break, but nope, there are end-of-semester exmaniatons from May to June, and then session examinations all August, meaning that those "gaps" are actually just for studying, resulting in no gap in the year except early September, unless you fill it with an intensive course or language course.

Semester Project

The semester project seems to be a little bit of a mixed bag, based on conversations I've had with other students. Some have gotten really lucky, and had a supervisor that wants to go the extra mile with them. Others have wanted to go the extra mile, but their supervisor won't give them any extra meetings, feedback, or collaboration. It does make sense; a semester project is typically done alongside other courses, and so it is reasonable to expect that students don't fully prioritize it. Reasonably, this leads to smaller scope, expectations, and interaction, which can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking for. It also means there's a little less time to ramp up a project; I think I personally bit off more than I could chew with mine, having little experience in the topic before-hand, and so it ended up being not so successful. That said, it's still an excellent opportunity to tackle a problem with more limited scope, and despite the final state of my project, I enjoyed working on it and learned a ton.

Master's Thesis

The full blown, six month full-time research experience, and a chance to dig deep into a topic. My semester project was about reinforcement learning, so I switched gears as recommended and took a vision-related project for the thesis. It was a blast. I hit the jackpot with my supervisors; they were communicative, fun to hang out with, understanding and patient when I was having a rough time, and more than willing to come to the lab to debug code, work together on the robot, and go out into the field and get dirty. The other students on the project was equally a joy to work with.

Funding

ETH has money. A lot of money.

Sometimes it manifested in more subtle ways; a meal at the mensa (cafeteria) costed about 5.80 CHF as a student, but that's about how much it costed to make by yourself, so they're subsidizing the cost of labour and the kitchen; the meal costs about 15 CHF for a non-student, which is probably a more accurate number. We got free beer and coffee from AMIV, the mechanical and electrical student association. I recall hearing that they had an excess CHF 50 000 in their budget my first year, which is about what my old all-engineering student association had for a whole year. Courses are between 8am and 7pm, although in my case, they were only between 8am to 5pm; I suspect this is because they actually have enough space on campus for their students, whereas my old university (which had twice the students but a smaller campus) needed to schedule classes from 8am to 10pm because they either couldn't afford to buy up the surrounding space to make more buildings, or just didn't care.

While the above examples of ETH's wealth require a bit of thinking about, sometimes it's incredibly obvious that this university is swimming in money. I was told that professors get something like a million francs a year each for research, no questions asked. Tuition is only about 2k per year, whereas it was about 10k back home. A single robotics lab has a dozen robots that cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and there's a dozen such labs. My master's supervisors were allowed to buy anything CHF 1000 or less without asking and got a few new multi-thousand franc computers for our project; perhaps to some this isn't a lot, but I recall getting a new Pixhawk being a big deal when doing research in undergrad. Their self-driving car team looks like it had more funding than all my old university's engineering teams put together, if not more than a lot of labs back home. Select bachelor capstone teams get to build their projects, whereas we just CAD-ed them. There were posters around the main building saying that, if you have a business idea as a professor, they'll give you something like 50k, no questions asked. I suspect this might have helped contribute to the huge number of spinoffs.

ETH Zurich has half the students my old university does, but 1.5 times the budget, and probably a lot more external investments.

Sweatpants

Back in Ottawa, unless you were in business or law, there's a decent chance the only pants you would wear year-round were sweatpants. I can't recall ever seeing them at ETH.

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Saying Good-Bye

I loved my time in Switzerland, and I loved my time at ETH Zurich. The university was everything I hoped it would be; fascinating hands-on classes with competent and enthusiastic professors, tons of cool toys, brilliant and lovely peers and researchers, and cutting edge research. Zürich is a beautiful city with more than enough personality, green space, and alpine views to keep me happy. The Swiss people I did meet and get to know were all wonderful. The Swiss transit system is the best I've experienced in my life by far, and of course, everywhere it can take you is breath-taking stunning. I absolutely loved my experience, and could easily see myself going back.

I acknowledge that my experience in Switzerland is that of a foreign student living there temporarily, in a bubble of other international students with the occasional Swiss friend popping in, and that this likely does not reflect what it would be like to live there a lifetime, to raise children, to work, etc. I think I was sheltered from lots of issues that people do face in Switzerland.

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Logistics

Going to Switzerland

Visa/Residence Permit

ETH Zurich has a ton of resources on the visa application/immigration process, residence permit process, health insurance (it's mandatory!), and more; I've linked some resources at the end of this section. I think it's essentially mandatory reading, but I'll cover some of the larger considerations.

As a student, I had to apply for a type D visa when in Canada. In terms of timing, you don't want to apply too early or too late; the office which processes them will ignore old ones, so you can't do it too soon, and doing it too late is bad for obvious reasons. As of writing this, ETH Zurich recommends applying for it no sooner than end of May/beginning of June. The visa you receive is only valid for three months; you must go to the local Kreisbüro and apply for a residence permit to get your yearly-renewed permit to stay in the country.

In order to get a visa, you must demonstrate sufficient funding. Unless you get one of the big scholarships, this means having CHF 21,000 in a bank account at the time of application as proof, and it must be in a bank that operates in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the timeline for this is relatively tight if you're hoping to rely on student loans, since the gap between being accepted (received February 22) and applying for a visa (end of May) isn't very large. In my case (Canadian), I had to open an account with HSBC, dump CHF 21,000 into it of very generously lent money, apply for the visa, then redisperse the balance. When you go to renew your residence permit after a year, you'll need to demonstrate sufficient funding again (yep, another CHF 21,000), although at this point you'll have a Swiss bank account and can use that.

There are definitely more pages with more information, it might just take a bit of looking around/searching.

Housing

Zürich lives up to its reputation of being tough to find a place to live. When my roommates and I were searching for replacement tenants, we would put an ad up and receive close to 100 answers a day. I was incredibly lucky; ETH has some rooms they provide to international students, and I was offered one of these, letting me skip the most painful room search, the initial one when trying to move to Zürich. I was allowed to stay for a year, but was in a much better position to search and interview that second year, since I was already in the city.

Honestly, I have no good advice for this; apply, apply, and apply some more. Oh, and make sure you actually sell yourself and interact with the information in the room listing. Far too often we had stock paragraphs or just no information when people emailed us about an open room, and with so much selection, we threw those in the garbage bin without a second thought. Saying you're clean and like people will get you no brownie points here, everyone puts it.

I've heard of people living in AirBnBs for a semester struggling to find a place. It's rough out there, best of luck.

Insurance

Health insurance is mandatory, and personal liability insurance is highly recommended. Health insurance for international students is a little expensive, but still a heck of a lot less than the Swiss pay.

German Courses

UZH offers language courses that aren't too expensive; I can highly recommend taking a German course or two at least. They offer once-per-week courses, as well as intensive courses you can take before the beginning of a semester. Make sure you have the enrolment date and time saved and as an alarm though, because they sell out within minutes.

Other Things To Do After Arrival

In an ideal world, you got the visa, bought your insurance, found a place to stay, flew in, got your residence permit. Now, you'll probably want to open a bank account, which (if memory serves) requires the residence permit to sign up for. If you're planning to take public transit, you'll want to create a SwissPass account (which I think you may need to go to a local ZVV (Zürich transit) office to sign up for, don't recall), which you can use to buy tickets around the country; the ZVV app/a ZVV account will allow to you buy a monthly pass for Zürich, while the SBB app can be used for buying tickets country-wide (including in Zürich). You'll probably want a Swiss phone number; I went with Digital Republic, because CHF 10 per month for unlimited data is really hard to beat. Finally, if you need anything to furnish your apartment (Woko properties provide beds and desks, but not sheets or pillows, and typically not nice lighting), Ricardo and Tutti can be good sources of used items.

Leaving Switzerland

There's a small checklist of things you must complete before leaving Switzerland; again, ETH has an excellent guide, but for completeness sake, I'll cover some of it.

You must deregister with the city, at one of the registration offices. Unlike when registering, you don't need to book an appointment for this and can just show up. It must be down no ealier than 30 days before leaving.

You can cancel your health insurance using the official confirmation of deregistration. Otherwise, they probably have some pretty draconian fees for early cancellation.

Woko contracts need to be terminated two months before moving out. I forgot about this, and had to pay an extra month of rent, with a sublease picking up the other. You can then request your deposit back, which they'll give after a few weeks, minus any damage.

Finally, there's the bank account.

Well, and whatever misc accounts you may have; SBB pass, phone plan, etc.