DACS Maastricht University Survival guide

This guide was composed by several students from DACS (formally DKE).

It has been reviewed on 05/07/2022 but still needs improvement, especially updates to the prices and relevant information for possibilities around the new building at Paul-Henri Spaaklaan 1. A new part has been added at the end. It mostly concerns high-achieving and/or very career-oriented students.

Any opinion on this guide is attributed to the person who wrote it and is not a statement from Incognito.

Uni

Projects

• Before starting any project; look up the problem in the book AI: Modern Approach (Russell & Norvig).
  This generally saves you about 4 weeks of work
• There will come a time when running a long experiment for 3 days straight, where it will crash on the 3rd day without any output.
  Obviously, day 4 is presentation day.
  • Ensure that you write out results while an experiment is running to a text file. It’s a one-liner you can look up on StackOverflow.
• Depending on that one guy in your group to do the coding for you is the quickest way to fail DKE. Yes, you will skate by. However, come the harder single assignments (year 2/3, Bachelor Thesis) you will crash and burn.
• Learn about version control.
  
  • Lookup git on Google
  • Get confused because of the pages upon pages of documentation, then download SmartGIT
  • Learn to select files, then press Commit.
  • Come to the understanding that you now have the power to "quick-save" all documents, not just code, and go back in time.
  • Regret all life decisions as you did not commit your work during that all-nighter before the presentation and you can’t replicate your results… or get any results for that matter.
  • Seriously, before changing anything, COMMIT YOUR WORK.
• Learn about LaTeX. No, not that kind of latex.
  • Use TexMaker, Overleaf or some online WYSIWYG LaTeX editor.
• Might seem like a no-brainer but.. attend the project examinations.

Books & Articles:

• Use the library search while being authenticated with your UM account
• PDF/Epubs of books and articles can be obtained from Library Genesis (All sorts of literature, including comics etc) See:
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
• Check with your professor whether the literature has changed recently. If not, get it second-hand from Facebook, or use your social skills.
• Check the library several weeks before the start of the actual course for free. You can extend up to 10 times without having to spend any money.

Studying

• Time management. The key to success is to identify when you will be swamped with work, and when not, and plan around that.
  • Week 1-4 in a block are the “Party/holiday” weeks.
  • Week 5-7 are the “Now let’s get shit done” weeks.
• No matter how well you got by doing things last minute in high-school / previous programs, you will crash and burn if you maintain the same attitude at DKE.
  • Cry {INSERT TIME X} from now when you realize that we told you this and you choose to ignore it.
  • No, this is not a challenge to showcase how intelligent you are because you could finish course X while you “only studied the night before” / “not at all”.
  • Realize that discipline vs. intelligence is very much like the tortoise vs the hare.

• Realize that every year builds upon the knowledge in the years before.
  Courses, in general, aren’t standalone.

  • Yes, you might finish Calculus with a 6 by cramming hard last minute. But you’ll pay for it every math course coming afterwards.
• BONUS EXERCISES: Easy way to get your grade up, and they often come back on exams.
• If you are easily distracted:
  • Try to limit all distractions. Try studying at the library / DKE (see next section), change your OS, etc.
  • Study in 45-minute intervals (check out the pomodoro technique) and reward yourself after each interval (go outside, etc)
• DKE has a lot of contact hours, but attending lectures (without sitting in the back, gaming) will give you ample time to do work ensuring that you’re free afterwards.
  • Most of the time, courses are linked to your current project. There will be insights you can gain to solve certain problems.
  • Be sure to at least skim the lecture pages, so that you don’t spend several hours discovering something that someone from another project group got handed to them in week 1.

Exams

• During normal semesters you will be swamped with project work in the week before exams.
  There are two kinds of students:

  • Those who study in week 6 (or earlier) instead of 7, and pass.
  • And those that don’t because they have to finish the project presentation, code, report, experiments AND FINALLY study.
• Review before exams with a group of students.
• Bring snacks (e.g.: bananas) & water. But don’t you dare bring anything that makes noise.
• http://wiki.msvincognito.nl tends to have old exams you can use to practice.
  • Make sure to do practice exams without your notes at least once. Besides the obvious, it forces you to acknowledge where you might want to spend more time practising. Protip: Print out lectures on paper before the lecture and take notes on them. Or take notes on lecture slides with a tablet.
• In case you do not know how to fully answer a question, write comments for the examiner. For example, you cannot work out an exercise, however, you know which technique you need to use and you can work it out on other examples. Describe it. You might get a few points still.
• Provide justification for everything. This is how you will get maximum marks for questions. You might know everything for the exam, yet get an 8 because you did not explicitly explain your answers. Get these easy points with proper justification.

Programming

• Programming subjects are ideal for self-study.
  Your development environment (IDE) and compiler give you an interactive feedback loop that quickly allows you to learn how to properly program. You have an automated system that will provide you with corrections.
• For those new to programming, realize that you are learning three things at once:
  • A new language; its syntax and vocabulary (API)
  • A new way of thinking; how to go from problem to code.
  • How to debug a logical program, and doubt everything about yourself.
    Divide up the learning process into these three categories and tackle them individually
• If you find that all of these things above are too much all at once, use an online code learning website such as codecombat.com, codecademy.com, or codingbat.com/java.
  • They tend to use more forgiving language.
  • They provide more ‘meaningful’ and shorter challenges. Above all, they give proper hints and personal feedback.
• Realize that truly learning how to program comes by doing projects of your interest.
• If you don’t know what Stackoverflow is, google it and learn to love it.

Math

• Realize that there is a ton of high-quality study material on the internet that you can partake in at your own speed, and ask questions anonymously.
  • Calculus: https://www.khanacademy.org/
  • Linear Algebra: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/

  • See MIT OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity etc.

      Caveat: Online videos aren't a replacement for lectures, as sometimes courses require specific techniques outlined in said lectures.
    

• If you have trouble understanding certain concepts, try searching online for “visualizations”. Most often someone made a very good visualization of concepts that you can interact with to grasp a subject in minutes, which normally through text can take forever to grasp.
  • Eigenvalues & vectors: http://setosa.io/ev/eigenvectors-and-eigenvalues/
  • Markov Chains: http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/
  • Machine Learning: http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/ etc…
• Realize that doing the actual exercises is crucial for math courses.
• Realize that you fundamentally lack the ability to review and correct your own exercises without outside help if you don’t fully grasp the subject.
  • Get a solutions manual, preferable one that shows you the steps of calculation.
  • Set up a group of students to review the course material. Split it up into sessions for making exercises and theory reviews. Get an experienced student to help with the theory review.
  • Help a group of students if you are experienced. The best way to review theory is to see if you can explain it to someone else.

Thesis

• Pick a topic that you know you can finish in 30% of the time.
  • By definition, you’re not experienced enough yet to estimate how long something will take, so you’ll still run short.
  • Try to limit risk or aspects over which you have no control. At the very least factor them in your estimation. E.g.:
    • Robotics: the robot could malfunction/break. You have to deal with signal noise on sensors. (Your excellent algorithm might work in lab conditions, but sadly fails miserably on sensors.)
    • Data-Mining: the dataset could be of shit quality (which happens about 95% of the time when dealing with real-world datasets). The dataset could be so big that any decent algorithm will blow up your little 32GB RAM ‘workstation’. Yes, I said 32GB of RAM was little. And obviously, the cluster that does have RAM is currently in use by some other student/PhD.
• Realize that “even bad results are results” is a blatant lie.
  • On that note: DO NOT falsify results.

A word about grades

This document has different authors therefore also slightly different opinions on matters. In contrast to what has been written in the last chapter if you don’t identify the necessary resources to participate in extra activities then simply don’t do it. It is very easy to dissipate your energies facing the many offers at UM. Furthermore, one rather calming theme for your studies can and should be: Do not care about grades. The only truly relevant challenge is to pass a course, even with a six. Especially many Bachelor students start of from high school where they are used to easy-As and perfectionism developed. It will not help you trying to keep up with that. The Dutch and even more Maastricht grading system is meant to keep you at a very average sounding grade and it takes immense skill to get an 8.5+ average GPA. Keep in mind that in your home country the best grade does not translate to a ten in the Dutch system. For example, the best grade in the German one-to-six system (where lower is better) 1.0 can be translated to 8.5 at UM. Also, there is no good reason to compare yourself too much to your fellow students or you will be discouraged.

Living

Sustainability guide

Maastricht for climate has a very handy and complete guide on how to be sustainable in Maastricht. It can be found here.

Cost of living

A great overview about the general costs is listed on Numbeo.

Housing

• Sign up with Maastricht Housing ASAP. Housing waiting lists are done based on the time you’ve been registered.
• Small student rooms run about 300-450€ out of the centre, 400€-500€ in centre. Expect to pay about 50€ more in your first year.
• Room availability tends to be highest December-May; as most students finish their study then, coupled with low demand.
• Pre-rent before your arrival if necessary

Food

Dinner

Decent, not too expensive (by Maastricht standards)

Type	Location	Where	Price
General	Cato-by-Cato	Near Library	€
General	Mensa	Near Economy Faculty	€ (Use UM card)
Burrito	With love burrito	Markt	€€
Dinner	Preuverij	Kakeberg 6 (Near SSC)	€€
Pizza with group	Donatello’s	Tongersestraat 30 (Near Tapijn)	€€
Vietnamese	Saigon Cuisine	Boschstraat 113 (near Market)	€€
Takeout Grill	Paru		€ (Special 5€ deal on pizza)

Lunch / Breakfast

Type	Location	Where	Price
General	Cato-by-Cato	Near Library	€
General	Cafetaria ToneelAcademi	Next to Tapijn (*)	€
Sandwich	Delibelge	Near DKE	€€
Breakfast	HEMA	Centre of Town	€€

(*) Secret entrance is the studded brown door, walk until you see a downwards staircase on your left, follow it down until you get to the cafetaria. See: https://tinyurl.com/yb3ggrj3

Protip: After a hangover, order eggs on bread + ham,cheese and a freshly pressed glass of juice. Breakfast of kings for ~4€. (They have filter coffee & sandwiches as well)

Cooking

• Great site, good food, not costly: http://www.budgetbytes.com/ Protip: Check out "Taco Pasta"
• Market on friday sells a bag of fruit/vegetables for 5€.
• Go to the ALDI or Lidl (cheaper supermarket) once in a while for ‘stockups’.

Must have

• Work late at night, or long hours on PC? Install F.Lux or Redshift
  (Ensures your eyes will last)

• Gym & Sports all year == 180€ @ UM Sport
  Do some form of sport (e.g.: bouldering) as even the tiniest bit of exercise will give you energy.

• Get a bike as soon as possible, you can get an used “omafiets” for around 50 €; also be aware of an old saying “In Maastricht you don’t buy a bike, you rent it temporarily.” so don’t get anything to fancy or it will be stolen. Only get a Swapfiets if you need to bridge a short period as it is very expensive.

• Get an OV-chipkaart to use public transport. If you have friends or family coming to visit you, you can get them an “NS fiets” from the station if you sign up for a free subscription.

More on Transportation

• Things to look out for when buying a second-hand bike:
  • Check if all gears are in working order. (Especially second gear as its an expensive fix) Watch out for worn down teeth.
  • Check if both brakes work properly.
• You can buy bikes from Jules, student bike shops, or Facebook groups. (Watchout for stolen bikes on the FB groups)
• Get cheap lights from the HEMA so you don’t get fined by the police. They patrol the centre of town semi-regularly.
• Besides the obvious chance of theft, don’t leave your bike unattended for more than a week as the municipality removes ‘discarded’ bikes.

Social

• DACS is relatively unique in the fact that due to its size students of all years tend to communicate with each other.
  Knowing someone from the years above you is a good thing (TM).
• Incognito tends to organize a wide range of activities for people of varying interests.
  • Ask an aKTie member when certain events of interest will be hosted, or whom you can contact for certain interests.

Groups

• Boardgames: https://www.facebook.com/groups/395260880543893/
• Roleplaying: https://www.facebook.com/groups/322206474811704
• Programming: https://www.facebook.com/groups/937739742957425/
• Magic - The Gathering: https://www.facebook.com/groups/magicmaastricht/

Sights

• Carnival (around February) is something you should have witnessed once.
  A ‘gentle’ introduction is done on November 11th on the Vrijthof.
• Go to the top of the local “mountain”, Sint Pietersberg.

Try hard mode

What follows is the advice for students who are very peculiar about their uni life and want the most of it academically. They seek the most of every career possibility, sometimes to a ridiculous level. They are usually referred to as try-harders.

Gaining experience

Some companies value soft skills. Some do not care that much about them and focus on your professional abilities. In general, however, it is a good idea to do something else than just very technical endeavours as you will have to work in teams in the future. Thus, the following are good additions to your CV:

• Organising events (career day, hackathon, LAN party, AI meetup)
• Something non-technical (especially dealing with people) is a good addition to your CV as well: being an active member of MSV Incognito committees, Student Ambassador, etc.
• More and more reading groups are emerging in DACS. It is a good idea to join them (or start one yourself) and extend your knowledge, perhaps carry out some project in Machine Learning, Mathematics, etc.

For additional material regarding undergraduate studies and gaining experience, consult the blog of Andrej Karpathy (a leading researcher in AI): https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/advice.html

Honours programme (Bachelor students)

Students with a good GPA (>7.5) are invited to join the honours programme. You can get experience in industry and get a small salary (KE@Work) or get research experience and potentially publish a paper (even before your thesis!) (MaRBLe).

Pros of KE@Work:

• A small stipend (€500-550)
• Two-year project (no normal projects)
• Two years of intern/job experience after graduating
• A lot of time to work on the topic of your thesis
• Again, you don’t need to do the projects

Cons of KE@Work:

• Little money compared to an actual job
• Two-year commitment (no possibility of going abroad, have to work during summers)
• Usually your bachelor thesis has to be on the topic that you explore in the company
• People sometimes have really bad experiences (company goes bankrupt, project is uninteresting, company does not treat your properly)

Pros of MaRBLe:

• A year (or more) of research experience (great for graduate programmes or other research endeavours)
• Possibility of publishing papers, going to conferences/workshops
• Gaining valuable experience before your bachelor thesis
• Possibility of going abroad in year 3 (MaRBLe can last for 1 year or optionally 1.5 years)

Cons of MaRBLe:

• Project can be very vague
• There is a possibility the students will not work on something that interests them
• Quite difficult to get good results, something worth publishing
• In some situations it might seem that you are working a lot for someone and not getting paid

More info here.

Internships

It is indeed difficult to do an internship during summer as DKE students have short (~2 months) summers. However, it is still possible to find them. In addition, it is possible to get a part-time and/or remote internship during your studies. Protip: if you are interested in working on an open-source project during the summer and getting paid for it, check out https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ and https://socis.esa.int/

Mentorships

Another way of getting experience and/or broadening your horizons is networking. These can usually be done part-time, so they do not interfere too much with your studies. One example: https://hellomentor.nl/.

Jobs

To get IT jobs, you will most likely need to already have experience. Be it an another internship, job, building your own projects, or contributing to open source projects. So getting a proper IT job will be very tough, especially for the first and second years.

If you are in need of income and think that you have some time in the weekends, consider looking for work that needs doing in the weekends (duh) or work that has flexible schedules.

Consider becoming a Student Ambassador for FSE or UM. Extra €100-150/month (depending on the amount of events) for relatively not much work. More info at https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/maastricht-university-ambassadors-team. Protip: inquire about the salary/hour - it depends on your age (if you are 21+, you get the biggest salary). Note: KE@Work people might not be eligible for tax reduction and thus earn less, inquire further to potentially apply for tax reduction.

Healthy, efficient, and productive mind and body

If you consider your mind to be your greatest asset and realize that it can easily be affected by external stimuli, this is the section for you.

Sleeping

This cannot be stressed enough. Sleeping is essential for forming memories and thus learning. It can easily determine your mood and thus affect your next day’s productivity. Manage your time to make sure you get enough sleep. More about it: http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm

From Andrej Karpathy’s blog: “It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. I feel like the brain “commits” a lot of shaky short-term memories to stable long-term memories during the night. I try to start studying for any big tests well in advance (several days), even if for short periods, to maximize the number of nights that my brain gets for the material.”

One of the most important things to keep in mind: going to bed drunk is detrimental to your sleep quality and consolidating memories. So, if you have a test in a week or so, DO NOT drink hours before bed. A study going more in-depth: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/even-small-amounts-of-alcohol-impair-memory/548474/.

Protip: amazing book on sleep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

Managing $CO_2$

This one is a bit far-fetched, one for the really paranoid ones.

There are studies on the impact of $CO_2$ on the human brain. It is unlikely that the level of $CO_2$ in your flat/room will do actual damage to your brain, but usually, a relatively high level of it makes you sleepy, less able to concentrate, and less productive. The most effective way to reduce $CO_2$ is to air your flat/room regularly. Check out https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548274/.

If you are intrigued by this, you could buy a $CO_2$ monitor, track the $CO_2$ level using it, and perhaps make some project out of it (an alarm system when the $CO_2$ level is very high, etc.)

Ergononomic computer accessories

DACS students spend a lot of their time on computers. Our hand placement, sitting posture, viewing degree and distance are often not natural. Long-term effects can arise over time and can be a huge pain in the ass (sometimes literally) in the future. Thus:

• It is a good idea to invest some time into creating a comfortable and harmless workstation.
• Get an ergonomic mouse, some stand for your screen/laptop and other ergonomic accessories.

Managing your tasks

It is easy to get distracted from things you need to do. Apps like Todoist and Habitica help you focus, keep to your good habits, and in general get stuff done.

Listening to audiobooks

We, DACS students, do not have much time for just sitting down and enjoying a book. Unfortunately, we spend quite a bit of time in our daily lives commuting, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and doing other not cognitively straining tasks. This is a perfect opportunity to listen to your favourite audiobook! You would be surprised how much time you spend doing these things, it is easy to go through 3-4 audiobooks per academic year. Consider investing into Audible for getting access to a wide variety of audiobooks. Protip: check out https://librivox.org/ for free audiobooks recorded by volunteers.