How can a student get a job at an Austrian university

I am a graduate student at TU Wien (Technische Universität Wien), studying Telecommunications, Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Since March this year, I have also been an employee of the Telecommunications Institute in the Mobile Communications group.

How it all began

Being still a completely frightened foreigner, a beginner student at TU, he attended the most difficult courses because of inexperience, and out of stupidity he tried to get good grades there and somehow prove himself. During my studies, I met very interesting guys who already worked at that time at the institute. Naturally, questions arose about how they work, what they do.

As it turned out, this is a common practice at my institute: recruiting master students for various research projects.

There are several research groups involved in both scientific development and the implementation of certain orders from various companies. The largest at my institute is the Mobile Communications group. Partners and sponsors include companies such as A1 Telekom Austria, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson Austria, Infineon Technologies, Nokia Research Center, Siemens Austria and General Motors.

The main members of these groups are PhD students and post-docs. At the moment, for 35 employees, only 5 students are graduate students.

Honestly, to say that I was stunned - to say nothing. Naturally, I got the idea to get into this number. So, there is a desire, it remains only to get a job =)

University job placement

Gathering courage and arrogance, he went to the head of one of the groups, and part-time to my teacher, to bow. After an hour of conversation, a short walk around the institute and another consultation with several employees, it was decided to hire me.

All that was required of me was to provide a scan copy of my Aufenthaltstitel and sign several documents. That's all. As a result, on March 1, I received the coveted key from my office, a comfortable chair for the fifth point and a computer with two monitors, as well as a neighbor with whom we also study together. And as my boss said, "Welcome to the club!"

What kind of work is this

The Mobile Communications Group consists of several divisions. I am part of LTE (4th generation mobile networks). We are developing an LTE simulator. This simulator is a huge program with more than half a million lines of code written in Matlab. It sounds scary already =)

Such a simulator allows you to make calculations of mobile networks without involving mobile operators, which makes it possible to verify the success of various schedulers and algorithms without time and money. I’ll explain how this happens using my example.

When I started to work, we just received a large order from General Motors - they wanted to receive certain data regarding communications between cars. My part included the creation of a smart planner and a specific topology. As a result, on October 1, several thousand lines of code and 25 gigabytes of simulation results were already listed behind me.

That is how we live.