EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Switzerland
Winter 2017 (February to August 2017)
I did exchange and research internship at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland from February to August 2017. It was my first time in Europe and it was so different from anywhere else I have been. It took me a while to get things I needed before school because of my poor French but everything worked out :)
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The academic program at EPFL was a bit different than UW. I had more flexibility to select courses without prerequisites and it was okay to have time conflicts on the schedule. Final exam had a huge weight (like 75%) on the final grade and the projects were very interesting and time-consuming. We had to find our own Time Series dataset to analyze and we had to build an interface for our database project. For my research internship, I worked for the Applied Statistics Lab at EPFL. I wrote neural networks classifier to classify colorectal cancer data.
| Besides school, I hiked, skied and visited a cheese factory and chocolate factory in Switzerland, traveled to other European countries and tried Swiss cheese fondue (Yum). |
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I made so many friends from all over the world, Melissa from Singapore, JiaYin from Montreal, Manbo from Hong Kong, Eliezer from Mexico, Max from Germany… the list goes on! It was an amazing experience in whole and I miss Switzerland so much!
If
you
are
going
to
Switzerland,
do
not
be
scared
away
by
its
expensiveness,
because
the
beautiful
view
always
pays
back
:)
Well,
I
do
have
some
practical
advice
too:
get
a
half-fare
travel
card
at
the
train
station
after
arriving
in
Switzerland,
check
for
supersaver
tickets
online,
practice
French
(they
don’t
normally
speak
English
in
town),
groceries
and
restaurants
close
early
every
day
and
normally
close
on
Sundays
so
get
enough
food
before
Sunday.
Prepare
well
for
hiking
and
skiing
trips
since
it
could
be
somewhat
dangerous
for
rookies
;)
and
have
lots
of
fun!
Do
not
hesitate
to
contact
me
at
y364wu@edu.uwaterloo.ca
if
you
are
interested
in
going
to
EPFL
or
Switzerland.
I’m
ready
to
help
:)