About & methodology
This site exists because the facts an international student needs (deadlines, requirements, real costs) are scattered across university subpages, PDFs and forum threads, and half of them are outdated. We collect them, check them, date them, and show our sources.
How data is sourced
- Official pages first. Programme data comes from the university's own programme and admission pages, cross-checked against DAAD's international programme database. Secondary aggregators are used only for corroboration and are labelled as such.
- Every fact carries provenance. Each page ends with its sources and a "last checked" date. Deadlines change every cycle; a fact without a date is a rumour.
- Unknown stays unknown. When we can't confirm a value, the page says "not confirmed". We don't infer intakes, invent deadlines, or round fees. When two official pages contradict each other, we show a warning instead of silently picking one.
How reviews are aggregated, and why we never quote
Student reviews are collected from public sources (StudyCheck, Reddit) and published only as paraphrased synthesis in our own words, with a link to the original source. Two reasons:
- Copyright and fairness: the original text belongs to its authors and its platform; a link sends you to it in context.
- Quality: a synthesis of recurring themes across many reviews is more useful than one person's strongest sentence. We state the sample size and note when it's small, and reviews with promotional bias (e.g. university-hosted testimonials) are excluded or labelled.
Aggregated reviews are clearly labelled as such; they are not verified submissions from students we've met. Verified first-hand reviews are planned for a later stage.
How often data is re-checked
Every record shows its own "last checked" date. Deadlines and fees are the fastest to rot: semester contributions change every semester, and application windows shift every cycle, so we re-verify these first. Where a figure is standard but not verbatim-confirmed (e.g. 120 ECTS for a two-year MSc), it is flagged in our internal gap log until confirmed.
Who builds this
Study Germany is built by Manav Dalvi, a data engineer who went through exactly this process as an applicant. It is independent and non-commercial: no university pays to be listed, no agency commissions, no affiliate links. The data pipeline, sourcing rules and this methodology are the product of treating study-abroad guidance as an engineering problem: structured data, provenance, and honesty about uncertainty.
Current scope
Stage 1 covers English-taught MSc programmes at Germany's leading technical universities, starting with TU Dortmund in full depth. Coverage grows university by university, and each new one has to pass the same sourcing bar before it ships.