oh yeah I finished that last week... it was surprisingly unspectacular

I've just got a bunch of exams left now

What's your area of study?

theoretical physics

O.O cool

I did my thesis with the maths department though (in computational fluid dynamics)

That's also really cool.

Isn't that where the Lorenz Attractor came from? Fluid dynamics?

sort of. meteorology I think

Ah, okay. I was close... kind of.

well yeah, it is fluid dynamics. just on a much higher level than what I was dealing with

Are you a master's or PhD student? (Or other)

Bachelor's degrees, at least in the U.S., typically don't have a thesis component, that's why I assume graduate.

MSci ... that's an undergraduate master's degree (I'm not sure if it exists in the States)

Undergraduate master's. Hmm. I'm not familiar with that. Is it like a concurrent master's with a bachelor's degree? We have that in the US.

I did do a BSc in Software Engineering before though (in Germany) for which I also wrote a thesis

Oh wow.

but yeah in the UK you don't write a thesis for a BSc either

@AlexA. nah it's just that you do 4 years instead of 3 and get an MSci instead of a BSc

Ah, okay.

alternatively, you can take your BSc after 3 years, and then do a 1-year MSc afterwards

In the U.S., a bachelor's program is typically 4 years, and then a master's is another 2 after completing the bachelor's.

in Germany it's 3/2 ... in the UK it seems to be either 3/1 or 3/2 depending on the field, I think

I wonder why it's 4 years in undergraduate in the U.S. and 3 in Germany and the U.K.

My girlfriend's father spent 6 years getting his undergraduate degree.

probably artifacts from how things were before everyone agreed on using the same designations for their degrees

until a few years ago you just did 5-year diplomas in Germany

that was really the only undergrad degree there was

Interesting

but it usually involved some form of "pre-diploma" (which I think was a small thesis) after 3 years, so they sort of converted the pre-diploma to a Bachelor's and the remainder of the diploma to the Master's degree

I don't know about UK vs US though

well, I should get some sleep... I'm happy to continue discussing cultural differences in academia some other day ;)

Sounds good.

Nice chatting with you.

Have a good night!

code jam has started.