Course information for exchange students at DTU

Regular courses

If you are interested in studying a semester of regular courses, you will be asked to select a group of courses that interests you and meets the requirements of your home institution.

Exchange students are welcome to take most courses at DTU in any department and at both BSc and MSc level, as long as the following requirements are met:

• The course is taught in English (students from Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are generally excepted from this requirement).
• The student meets the necessary prerequisites. If a course has a mandatory prerequisite, this will be mentioned in the course description (example). Please note that it is your own responsibility to check that you have the necessary prerequisites for the courses that you sign up for, and that the course responsible may have to approve that you meet the required prerequisites.
• The course is not reserved for students on a specific DTU study programme. If so, this will be written in red just under the course title in the course description (example).

Furthermore, exchange students should also be aware of the following:

• Courses may be oversubscribed (too many students sign up), preventing you from taking the course. If a course is oversubscribed, it is important to attend the first lecture if one has hopes of joining the course.
• Courses may be cancelled with very short notice (e.g. if not enough students sign up for the course), although this happens very seldom.
• If only one or two international students sign up for a course, the lecturer may decide to change the language of instruction to Danish, and then give the international students special lectures in English.
• The course catalogue is continuously updated, thus minor changes may occur.

Course search

With more than 1200 courses taught in English within the natural and technical sciences, there is plenty of opportunities to find a wide range of courses in almost any engineering area and discipline. The course offer for the coming academic year is published each year in May.

Search our online course catalogue, where you can search by keyword or by department.  When searching the course base, please pay attention to the fixed DTU schedule for the 13-week period (February to May and September to December), which is as follows. Each course has a time slot allowing you to know when it is taught and as such allowing you to plan your desired schedule in advance. The time slots consist of the codes below and an E or an F before that. E means Autumn and F means Spring.

Course registration

If you have received your DTU Acceptance Letter, you will be able to sign up for courses when the course registration period (internal link) begins.

Course registration for the autumn semester takes place in July and August, whereas course registration for the spring semester takes place in December and January. 

Please note that there is no guarantee for participation in the courses you have registered for. If a course is overbooked (too many students sign up), full degree students will have first priority.

It is possible to revise your choice of courses upon arrival. Please note that your course registration also registers you for the final examination. However, you may cancel your exam registration up until one month before the start date of the examination period.

Please note that it is your own responsibility to check that you have the necessary prerequisites for the courses that you sign up for.

Credit load and teaching structure

As an exchange student at DTU, you are recommended to take between 20 and 30 ECTS credits per semester depending on the requirements of your home university and your own wishes. 60 ECTS credits constitute a full academic year. The ECTS point system (European Credit Transfer System) is fully compatible with DTU's credit system, whereby 1 credit/ECTS equals 28 hours.

The semester at DTU is divided into two teaching periods, a 13-week period and a 3-week period. In between the two teaching periods is an exam period for courses conducted in the 13-week period. The 3-week period (January and June) is optional and represents the opportunity to take an additional course of 5 ECTS intensively/full time. In other words, it is only possible to follow one course during the 3-week period. The exam of the 3-week courses is on the last day of the course. A semester at DTU is optimally distributed with 25 ECTS in the 13-week period and 5 ECTS in the 3-week period. For further details about the teaching structure, please see the academic calendar.

Project Work

In addition to, or instead of regular courses, it is also possible to do project work. DTU has the concept of project courses (internal link), which is an individually designed academic course. If you wish to do project work, we advise you to check out the pages of the relevant departments at DTU and find out what they have to offer. Or you could look up a relevant professor and send a proposal including your CV, transcript and a description of the subject/project that interests you. The professor may request that you complete certain courses before starting a project. Another way to find projects is to search the database DTU Career Hub. If you are not yet accepted as a student at DTU, you can choose to log on with your private e-mail address.