The bachelor's programme provides the students with a sound theoretical base, which is invaluable for working with applications and software development, and a necessity for further study and research in computer science. In the master's programme, students are given a broad overview of computer science. The focus is on understanding the core principles of how and why things work and on the application of these principles. The strong theoretical underpinning of the master's study programme gives our graduates a competitive advantage in a dynamically evolving world where today' technologies are often obsolete tomorrow.

Two distinctive aspects of our programmes ought to be highlighted. First, in our curriculum we put a strong emphasis on ideas and concepts that have stood the test of time and that will endure. This is the reason for the large number of classes in mathematics, compared with most other computer science programmes at other universities. Second, the majority of the prominent and distinguished researchers at our faculty teach even at the undergraduate level. Thus, interested students have the opportunity to become acquainted with the research environment very early on.

Top Level Institution

As there are plenty of computer science schools these days, the quality of these schools is one of the important factors that prospective students look at. How does the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics stand in comparison with others?

Our faculty is consistently ranked as the best computer science school in the Czech Republic. More importantly, Microsoft Academic Search places our faculty among the top ten institutes worldwide in discrete mathematics, a subject which is a cornerstone of computer science today. Additionally, our faculty is one of the few schools that has ever won the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. The competition is organized every year by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, and hundreds of three-member teams participate in it.

This demonstrates that the faculty is doing extremely well in both theoretical and practical aspects of computer science. Let me give two more examples to highlight the quality of our faculty.

Example 1.

A few years ago, Professors Nesetril and Matousek wrote a Czech textbook, "Kapitoly z diskretni matematiky", covering more or less the material on which they had lectured in a required first year course in our Computer Science programme. Since that time the textbook has been translated and published in five other languages, including English, and publication of translations into two other languages is underway.

Example 2.

Some years ago, a group of three students from our faculty developed, as a part of their practical work in the Computer Science programme, the BIRD routing system. Over the years, this system has become the most widely used tool of its kind among internet peering centres around the world. Very roughly, peering centres are responsible for traffic exchange between different internet service providers, and they need software that organizes this exchange. There are hundreds of large-scale peering centres around the world. When you send an email it typically has to pass though several such centres. As mentioned, most of these centres use the BIRD routing system. Thus, whenever you get an email, most likely the BIRD routing system took care of it at some point! The same applies for working with websites and other internet services -all internet traffic is, in some way, organized and affected by the routing systems in peering centres. It should now come as no surprise that the BIRD routing systems affects a large proportion (40 - 50 %) of internet traffic today.

Students and Admission

The programmes are open to students from all over the world. The admission procedure is organized in two rounds, a winter round and a spring round, with deadlines at the end of February and the end of May, respectively. For the bachelor's programme, we require from applicants a school leaving certificate and either success in standardized tests such as TOEFL, ACT, SAT, or in the entrance examination at our faculty.

Tuition fees for the bachelor's and master's Computer Science programmes amount to 3000, resp. 5000 EUR, for EU, resp. non-EU students. The estimated monthly cost of living is between 400 and 600 EUR.

Why English programmes at Charles University in Prague?

Prague was an important cultural and political metropolis when Charles University was established in the 14th century, and the new university soon attracted not only many foreign students, but also many foreign teachers. Today Prague remains an important cultural and political metropolis, many professors from Charles University are known worldwide, there are many international projects at our university, and yet the number of foreign students and professors at Charles University in Prague is still quite limited. As we believe that foreign students and professors bring immeasurable benefit to the university, both for local students and local academics, we have begun working towards change in this respect. A crucial impetus for our effort was the election of our current dean, Prof. Kratochvil, in mid 2012 - the opening of the English programme is one of his priorities. Also, the steep decline in the Czech population of 18-19 year olds in recent years makes it an ideal time for opening the university to students from other countries.

The Computer Science in English programmes at Charles University in Prague do not come out of the blue. Several programmes with English as the language of instruction have been running at Charles University very successfully for years. The medical schools, in particular the First Faculty of Medicine, have been offering English programmes in medicine and dentistry since the 1990s. At our faculty, a European Master's Program in Language and Communication Technologies has been running for international students for a couple of years. We have also for many years been organizing popular Spring Schools, and together with several prestigious American universities, including Rutgers, we have been participating in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates programme. This year, apart from the Computer Science programmes, a master's programme in Mathematics in English has also been introduced. We are furthermore considering opening a bachelor's programme in Mathematics or a programme in Physics in the near future.

Graduates

Our graduates successfully pursue careers worldwide in many well-known companies, such as Google, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Avast. However, our graduates not only pursue their careers in large well-established companies, but some of them have also successfully established new ones. An example is Inmite, a company developing mobile applications. Other graduates have decided to stay in academia and you can meet them at ETH Zurich, University of Warwick, MIT or Stanford University, to name just a few.

Website for English Computer Science programmes:
http://www.mff.cuni.cz/admission/