Settling in
A large part of the university's student life is organized by the BME Student Center. In particular, they can give you individual advice regarding administrative issues, how to find housing, and so on. In addition, the BME office of the Erasmus Student Network provides international exchange students with information and help.
You may need the homepage of the Central Academic Office of the university. For instance, here is what they say about visa issues. And here is the official 2020/21 bulletin for Engineering programs in English, with some of the information overlapping with our program. And a nice brossure is the BME Survival Guide 2010. It is of course slightly outdated, but still is a good starting point regarding most questions you may have.
What are the living costs in Budapest? You can find information about it by following this link and scrolling down the page.
Although the language of instruction at our MSc programme is English for everyone, there is an obvious difficulty that foreign students have to face: Hungarian is a rather strange language, and although more and more people in the country speak English, it will be a challenge at the Great Market Hall to negotiate the price of the apricot with the old ladies or ask for your favourite cut of beef at the butcher. Well, if you worry about such things, you should learn Hungarian! All students at the university can take a certain number of language courses offered by the university free of charge, and among these, of course, there are Hungarian language courses.
First lesson in Hungarian: the Technical University is called Budapesti Műszaki Egyetem, where műszaki means technical and egyetem means university. Hence the commonly used abbreviation BME and the nickname Műegyetem.
Sports
The university has a modern sports and fitness center, running a wide range of classes, from different kinds of fitness programs to aikido and capoeira training, squash, wall climbing, etc. The university also has all sorts of sports teams, a hiking club, and ski camps are organized regularly.
Cultural life
If you play some instrument or sing well, you may want to join the university's Symphonic Orchestra or the Eugene Wigner Chamber Choir of the Faculty of Sciences.
The university hosts one of the best alternative theatres in Budapest, called Szkéné Theatre, where BME students recieve a discount, and many of the performances have English subtitles.
Five minutes from the department, on the Danube, is the A38 ship, which was voted the world's greatest bar by a Lonely Planet poll, and where you can enjoy stellar rock, jazz and alternative music performances and art exhibitons. And, across the Danube, you can find the Palace of Arts, with a slightly more mainstream (but still very exciting!) program and one of the best concert halls in Europe.
Budapest used to have one of the best art cinema networks in the world. By now, this has somewhat collapsed, but it is still pretty good. Here is a list of English screenings today in all Budapest cinemas.
The city is famous of its ruin pubs: century-old abandoned apartment buildings converted into pubs.The most famous of these pubs, Szimpla Kert, was voted the world's third best bar on the same Lonely Planet poll.
