Three students analysing code on a laptop during a project meeting.

Courses & research

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

Core specialisation courses
For all students in Sustainable Computing

20 EC

Advanced specialisation courses
You should choose four of the advanced specialisation courses to deepen your expertise on a topic of your interest within the specialisation.


At least
20 EC

Examples of advanced specialisation courses are:

Profiling space
You can choose from suggested electives, take additional advanced specialisation courses or courses from other specialisations to reach the total 120 EC.  


25 EC

Some examples of how you can fill up your profiling space:

  • Electives from other CS specialisations or related Master’s (EE, EMSYS, BIT, ITECH, and AM)
  • Internship
  • Exchange programme 

Individual final year project


40 EC

  • Research Topics (10 EC)
  • Final project (30 EC)

Total EC

120 EC


Do you want more information about these courses?

or meet online with a student and gain first-hand experience!

Internship

In the second year of your Master’s in Computer Science, you can choose to do an internship. This is your opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills in sustainability engineering directly within the industry – whether at high-tech companies, data centre operators, research institutes, or innovative tech start-ups. The EEMCS faculty at the University of Twente maintains strong connections with a wide network of organisations where you can tackle real-world performance and efficiency challenges.

Previous students have done internships at:

  • Research institutions such as imec, TNO-ESI, or CERN, working on performance and sustainability engineering across diverse systems and applications.
  • Tech pioneers such as StreamHPC or Leafcloud, focusing on software development and optimization to achieve better energy efficiency.
  • Data centre and supercomputer operators like SURF, designing and developing system software to improve the utilisation, efficiency, and sustainability of large-scale (super)computing systems.

Master's thesis

You will complete your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis. You can either do an external master’s thesis project at a company or at another higher education institute or conduct research at the University of Twente within various research groups:

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

  • How can we make AI agents more sustainable?
  • How can we provide energy labels for digital services?
  • Can we build datacenters with guaranteed sustainability?
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