Study in Germany: where I study

25th Anniversary of Department of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University

I've almost finished my first semester of graduate school and I realize I haven't written anything about my study in Germany. So, I'm currently studying at Saarland University. It is located in the city of Saarbrücken in Saarland region, a small region near the border of France and Luxembourg.

What do I study here? I've actually mentioned in my previous post, but unfortunately, it's in Indonesian. Anyway, the following conversations are usually set up whenever someone (S) asks me (M) about what I study.

IF S has no computer science background and M wants to explain THEN:

S : "What do you study here?"

M: "Computational linguistics."

S : "Ah, so you learn linguistics like ...languages?"

M: "Nah, it is like an interdisciplinary between computer science and linguistics."

S : "Ah, so you learn about programming languages then."

M: "Umm.. well.. not necessarily. It is more like learning about language technologies, like Siri on your phone or Google Translate."

S : "Ah, I get it."

M: (do you really get it??)

ELSE IF S has computer science background and M wants to explain THEN:

S : "What do you study here?"

M: "Computational linguistics."

S : "Hmm.. what is that exactly?"

M: "Nah, it is like an interdisciplinary between computer science and linguistics. Or simply whatever related to NLP (Natural Language Processing)"

S : "Ah, I get it."

ELSE IF M is lazy to explain THEN:

S : "What do you study here?"

M: "Informatics (a.k.a. Computer science)."  (then feel bad because of lying :p)

Before I came to Germany, I did some research on top computational linguistics school in Europe. And some references mentioned that Saarland University is one of them. According to a friend of mine who's a post-doc researcher in computational linguistics area, this university is quite prominent in NLP researcher community. Moreover, the fact that there are some prominent research institutes that work with this university, such as Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Informatics, MPI for Software System, and DFKI (German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence), made me more excited to start school as soon as possible. It's also a fact that the computer science department has a good reputation as one of top CS schools in Germany.

At first, I didn't know that computational linguistics department (Coli) in Saarland is not part of computer science department (CS). I knew it on my first campus visit when the LCT assistant took me on a campus tour. Those departments are even separated by location quite far, around 7 mins walk. And when you walk to CS dept area, you will notice immediately which department in the university has a lot of money :v Whatever, I like both Coli, as it's where I belong, and CS, as it's where I hang out (i.e. the library) haha

If you know me well or have been reading my blog for quite some time, you know that I am just a big fan of Germany football team. Studying in Germany has been my dream since I was a kid. When I got a chance to study in Italy, I felt I was like only a few more step from my dream. Now that it's coming true, I can't say anything but be grateful. This achievement will commence the next steps towards my goals in life :D