Courses & research | Software Technology

During your Master’s in Computer Science, you will earn a total of 120 EC within two years. In addition to the mandatory course Computer Ethics, you will take four mandatory specialisation courses, advanced specialisation coursers, and elective courses. As part of the electives, you can also do an optional internship, take courses from other specialisations and programmes, or study abroad. You will complete your Master's by writing your master’s thesis.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), which is widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work.

STRUCTURE

Year 1 and 2	Number of EC
Mandatory course For all Master’s in Computer Science students.	5 EC	Computer Ethics
Core specialisation courses For all students in Software Technology.	20 EC	Design of Software Architectures Software Testing and Risk Assessment Principles of Programming, Processes and Patterns System Validation
Mantle courses You should choose at least four of the mantle courses to develop expertise on a topic of your interest within the specialisation.	20 EC	Examples of mantle courses are: Advanced Logic Graph Algorithms and Complexity Software Management Interactive Theorem Proving Model Driven Engineering Modeling and Analysis of Concurrent Systems Software Evolution
Orientation You have to choose between the design and the research orientation.	10 EC	Design orientation Industrial Software Engineering Project Research orientation Capita Selecta Software Technology Software Science course Examples of Software Science courses are: Graph Transformations Program Verification Model Checking and Parity Games Probabilistic Model Checking
Elective courses You can choose from suggested electives or take courses from other specialisations to reach the total 120 EC.	25 EC	Examples of elective courses are: Managing Big Data Requirements Engineering Processes and Methods Data Science Performance Evaluation
Individual final year project	40 EC	Research Topics (10 EC) Final project (30 EC)
Total EC	120 EC

INTERNSHIP

In the second year of your Master’s in Computer Science, you can choose to do an internship. This way, you can apply the knowledge and skills you have acquired during your studies at a financial institution, a high-tech company, a government agency, a healthcare company, or a start-up founded by alumni of the specialisation such as Egeniq. The EEMCS faculty at the University of Twente has connections with a large number of research institutes, corporations, and start-ups where you can do your internship project.

Previous students have done internships at:

High-tech companies such as Aicas creating embedded IoT and edge-to-cloud solutions
High-tech organisations such as Thales Netherlands B.V. that design and produce electronics for defence and security applications
IT services and IT consulting companies such as Puur ICT

MASTER'S THESIS

You will complete your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis. You can either do an external master’s thesis at a company or at another higher education institute or conduct research at the University of Twente within the research group Formal Methods and Tools (FMT). There are various topics in which you can delve depending on your interests and career ambitions. You can, for example, verify the robustness of a deep neural network that can be used to classify new images of stop signs for autonomous vehicles and collision avoidance systems. What about developing an IoT-based solution to protect medical data from unauthorised access?

As part of your master’s thesis, you can undertake a research project such as:

How can you prove that the Maeslantkering (the biggest flood barrier in the Netherlands) works flawlessly, at any time, especially in times of need?
How can you decide whether the traffic sign detection mechanism of an autonomous car is reliable, thereby avoiding catastrophic crashes?
How can you minimise the model of a hardware circuit so that you can check whether it works correctly?

Career perspectives