Academics at WHU

Guest Post By: Junior studying Accounting, Katie Munger. This Fall, Gabriel studied abroad at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Business.

Going into my University Exchange at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, I didn’t really know what to expect in regards to the academic side of things. The structure at WHU is a lot different than it is here at UW. There’s no set class schedule, so you could have class every day for one week and no class the next. The times and rooms of each class changes daily; the only constant is the professor. The classes at WHU are also usually three hours long, so classes at UW feel comparably short. WHU is also on a semester system, but their semester is split into two quarters. Most of the classes only span for one quarter (except German language courses), but the classes will be in modules, so the classes each quarter are connected but different. For example, during my first quarter I took a class called Business Taxation, and in the second quarter I look Cases in Business Taxation, where we applied what we learned in Business Taxation to examine and solve different cases. 

This class structure was a little hard to get used to at first, but I actually ended up enjoying it. Sometimes it was tough not having a set structure to my week, but it made it easier to travel as I would occasionally have three, four, or even five day weekends. It also allowed a lot of time for studying, since I typically never had more than one class per day. I took five classes in total while I was abroad, and I felt like it was just the right workload for me. The classes there are relatively hard, mostly because the school is competitive, but the professors are fantastic and I definitely learned a lot from them; getting to learn about business from an international perspective was a very interesting and enriching experience.