Overview of TUM Aerospace Semester 1 Courses

During the first semester, you will partake in 7 courses. This post should give you a small insight into all the courses, to know what to expect and learn some preparation tips.

General terms

Lecture tutorial - Tutorials by students who scored well on the course that are primarily meant to teach you a concept. The tutors usually prepare some notes to introduce during this tutorial type. For the nosy ones, these tutorials usually pay 7 hours/week with 2-3 hours of in-person time.

Q&A tutorial - Tutorials by students who scored well on the course who sit in the front of the classroom and answer your questions on an exercise sheet given for the week. For the nosy ones, these tutorials generally pay 4 hours/week with 2 hours in-presence time.

CE (Central Exercise) - an exercise session once per week that is given by the PhD teaching assistant to supplement the lecture.

Engineering Mechanics 1 (EM1)

Mechanics 1 is one of the GOPs. There is plenty of information and tips to talk about, hence I wrote a separate blog post specifically for this subject that can be found here.

Advanced Mathematics for Engineers (AM1)

AM1 is the other GOP for aerospace engineering. The final score of the course is 100% based on the final exam, and the exam is 1.5 hours. The course covers linear algebra and calculus topics, the main ones being:

• Vector operators, vector basis, orthogonal basis with Gram-Schmidt
• Matrix operations
• Infinite series
• Limits with L'Hopital
• Taylor Series
• Differentiation
• Integration

The AM1 course is the heaviest one you take in the first semester, reflected by its 8 ECTS. This course has 3x lectures, 1x CE, and around 10x lecture tutorials (you should go to one of them, although around 10 are offered from different tutors). The number of introduced topics is very high, however, many students have had previous exposure to numerous topics in high school. As a result, most students find Mechanics 1 substantially higher in workload compared to math.

During the semester, I strongly recommend you attend the exercise sessions. The tutorial questions are the most difficult ones and, as usual, the tutors have the most experience with the difficulties students may encounter.

AM1 is relatively computation-heavy compared to other mathematics courses in later semesters, focusing on computation over proofs. This generally reduces the difficulty for students, but make sure you're careful during the exam.

Understand the topics fundamentally, not just how to apply the equations

I strongly recommend you understand the topics fundamentally, not just how to apply the equations. Future mathematics and engineering courses build off knowledge from AM1, and the concepts here make your life easier as an engineer. Fully understand them, and you will struggle much less in your future studies.

Hardest topics

For AM1, I personally found the start with vectors the most difficult. I am quite good at computation and calculus, but struggle more with mathematical proofs and lemmas. Hence the start, which is more axiom-focused, was a bit harder. The course overall, however, is not the most difficult one in your first semester, so just don't fall behind and you'll be fine.

CAD/TD

CAD/TD is, in my opinion, the course with the highest workload relative to its ECTS in the entire Aerospace program. The course consists of a lecture, a CE and 4 Q&A tutorial sessions. It's recommended to attend 1.5 hours of the tutorial weekly.

The course is scored with 40% weight going towards the projects, and 60% to the final exam. The project has 2 parts, and both involve designing a component in SolidWorks and making a technical drawing from it.

The first project task focuses primarily on fundamental operations in SolidWorks and on not over-defining your technical drawing. The technical drawing aspect is covered in the course, but on the SolidWorks side you have to experiment a bit and primarily rely on asking tutors for assistance.

The second project task is significantly harder than the first, requiring much higher-level knowledge of SolidWorks and involving assemblies. The final output is still a technical drawing.

The projects have a deadline of 2 weeks from when you receive the task. After 2 weeks, you must submit your first draft. The project is then assessed on a pass/fail basis. A pass awards you the full 20%, while a fail results in a deadline extension to fix your issues, after which you resubmit for a penalty on the score. Aim to pass both projects on their first submissions to get the full 40% - it's not too difficult.

The projects are your first great introduction to overwhelmed tutors. For the first many weeks before the projects start, the tutorial itself is a ghost town, barely anyone in sight. The moment the projects start, every tutor has a double-digit queue as if they're handing out candy. Because of this, be smart about the tutorials. Go early when it's empty to develop a good bond with the tutors, and during the projects, ask straightforward and fast questions. Don't be the person who stalls a tutor for 30 minutes asking something a simple AI or Google search could solve. Reserve only meaningful questions for the tutors. If everyone did this, the overwhelming problem just wouldn't occur, but of course, tragedy of the commons exists for a reason.

The final exam is a 1.5-hour paper-based exam mainly covering lecture content. Questions regarding SolidWorks itself can potentially be asked, but they are generally not the core of the exam. Make sure you listen out for exam tips given in the lecture and exercises. TUM generally favours students who show up to courses, and rewards them with very good exam information, so go to every lecture and exercise.

The exam itself is quite easy - it's more memory-based than understanding-based. Being an engineering topic, even the memory-based concepts are generally rooted in logic, so you can mostly derive the answer too. This course really isn't difficult, it's just a lot of work for 3 ECTS.

Computational Foundation 1 (CF1)

Computational Foundation 1 is the most polarising course in your first semester. Half the people you talk to will tell you it's the easiest course in the whole program, the other half will tell you it's impossible. Both perspectives are grounded in reality, so why is the perception so different?

The course consists of a lecture, a CE, and a lecture tutorial.

CF1 is the informatics course that you take in aerospace. It is focused on the fundamentals of coding itself, rather than actually writing much code. The coding language used is C, but learning to code well will not help much in the exam (I learnt that the hard way). Instead, the exam usually consists of T/F theory questions, single-choice questions, a Turing machine task, 1-2 coding output tasks (where you're given code and you need to write what the output is, maybe fill in a missing line) and some other task that changes yearly.

The course content is very easy, just ensure you show up to lectures. This lecture, more than any other, will tell you how to prepare for the exam. The professor for this course really wants everyone who shows up to get an excellent score, so he will strongly guide you towards what's important for the exam. If you show up to every lecture, you're in great shape.

Do learn to code in C on your own time, though. Knowing how to code is always a useful skill, and even in the age of AI, where you're never going to be better than an AI at coding, you might still be asked questions in an interview or exam about coding or coding logic. You're never going to learn those if you only code with AI, so just learn a bit on your own too.

Intro to Aerospace

Intro to Aerospace, my good old friend. A 3-credit pass/fail course that requires you to write a short academic-style 'paper' for 4 aerospace topics. Each topic has to be related to one of the lectures, which are given by the department heads of a specific subfield in aerospace. Each paper must cite 4 sources from the IEEE database, use academic writing, and be cited properly. The primary focus of this course is to prepare you for the academic writing required for future research you do (thesis, actual research papers, etc.).

I graduated from TUM Aerospace in roughly five and a half semesters, and with distinction. Even so, I can confidently say I failed Intro to Aerospace the first time. This course has a microscopic fail rate, and you generally can only really be failed for plagiarism, which I did not do. I still failed because the person marking my papers was not handed a marking rubric and thought content was the primary concern. As a first-semester student, I had very limited aerospace knowledge and had some content errors as a result. This really wasn't an issue, though, as I just resubmitted the same file with slight content adjustments (I changed 3 sentences total) and got a pass.

This course honestly is way more useful than you'd initially think. IEEE is a fantastic database for engineering articles, and likely the primary place you will find citations for your thesis. When I was writing my thesis, I found all my initial ideas and many of my final works on IEEE. It is a super clear database and is structured nicely to let you read and cite things easily. Take this course a little more seriously than you might initially intend - it will pay off in the long run.

The lectures themselves are also very worth attending. Aerospace engineering is quite a vast field, and you likely don't know what you want to specialise in at the start. The Intro to Aerospace lectures are 2-hour summaries of the cool work each institute is doing, and it's truly worth going to find what sounds interesting to you.

Electrical Engineering

Electrical Engineering is one of the two full-year courses in your first two semesters. This course teaches you the fundamentals of electrical engineering.

The course consists of a weekly lecture and a CE. Electrical Engineering is another polarising course in Aerospace. On the one hand, the required knowledge for each topic really is not too extensive, especially to pass the course, where only around 30% is needed. On the other hand, it's not close to any of the courses you're going to do in the degree program, and it requires intuition into electrical engineering. As I like to say, I'm not an electrical engineer, and if I liked electrical engineering, I probably would've studied that instead. As such, this is the worst I scored in any course in my whole degree.

I can say for certain, though, it doesn't have to be your worst too. The reason I did so poorly in Electrical Engineering is that I did the opposite of what I suggested for Mechanics 1. I really let this subject go until very late into the semester before I tried, saving the majority of understanding for the exam phase. This is a really stupid idea, and no one should do it. Please keep up with Electrical Engineering throughout both of your semesters, not only at the end of the 2nd semester like I did. Trust me on this: looking back, the actual amount of knowledge you need in Electrical Engineering is not much, especially on a per-topic basis, so as long as you try a bit throughout the whole semester, it's not going to be too difficult.

IMPORTANT: Many students don't take Electrical Engineering until a later semester. This is a horrible idea, and I strongly recommend against it. TUM Aerospace exams are scheduled very nicely to allow time between each exam for preparation. If you intentionally push an exam to a later semester (not by failing it, but just by choice), you're going to have exam time clashes (usually with Fluids 1 in your 3rd semester, and Fluids 2 in your 4th). You will likely then push Electrical to the 5th semester and just have to worry about it the entire time. If you're especially bad at electrical engineering (a possibility if you're considering pushing it that far back), you even limit yourself to only 2 passing attempts before needing to take an extra (7th) semester. Just get the course out of the way when you're supposed to.

Aerospace Materials Science and Processing (AMSP)

AMSP is your other full-year course, consisting of a weekly lecture and CE. AMSP is your materials engineering course that specialises in which material you should use for which applications, and the techniques used to shape the materials.

Many students absolutely disrespect this course. It is, once again, one of those courses that is a major in itself, so they don't expect too much from you. However, the difference between AMSP and Electrical is that AMSP is substantially easier, especially regarding the exam.

The AMSP exam is a multiple-choice exam, done on your own computer on campus. The amount of lecture and exercise content you need to memorise is quite high, but it's probably something you're mostly used to from high school. Imagine something like biology or law, where the majority is memory-based rather than application-based. As a result, the exam itself isn't too difficult, it's just that the preparation requires you to memorise many details quite quickly.

AMSP is one of the courses I think back on the most. The lectures were quite boring for me, and I didn't really engage well with them, but the things I learned there have stuck with me for a very long time. I often recall information I memorised for that exam and use it commonly. It's really frequent as an engineer that I need to know the density or tensile strength of aluminium or other common metals, or know when I should use a thermoset vs a thermoplastic. AMSP is the only reason I have an idea about these things, and it makes my everyday decisions much more informed. This is, unexpectedly, the course you'll be really happy you learned well. The exam is also quite lenient, so you'll likely get a grade you're satisfied with. Compared to Electrical, I'm more okay with you delaying the studying for this one. As stated, it's mainly memory-based, so cramming it in at the end is less penalising.