Austria's Educational System

New week, new theme! :) I told almost all of you already anyway, but I'm really happy about how this blog turns out and you are really a nice, interesting and funny bunch of guys!

I will try to give you a brief overview of our educational system, but I already have to say that I can only really tell you about my university, the Medical University of Innsbruck, and not about universities in general. And I will not try to translate the terms, because they are not equal e.g. to high school in US. So let's start, shall we?

Around the age of 3 children go to kindergarten, and I probably don't need to translate you that one, because it's a lovely Germanism in the English language. At the age of 6, children start Volksschule, which takes 4 years. Then you have two options: 1) you attend Hauptschule, which finishes after 4 years and then you start vocational training and become... a hairdresser. Or a car mechanic. That sort of jobs. Or 2) if you are smart, you go to Gymnasium. After 4 years, you again have the choice to change to vocational training or a different (often specializing) school or you stay in Gymnasium. After another 4 years, so 8 years in total, at the age of 18, you finish with a series of exams called Matura, which qualifies you for studying at a university.

Now it gets a bit tricky because as I said, university is not my field of expertise. The Universität consists of Fakultäten, which are again divided into Institute. In general there are three titles you can achieve: bachelor, master and Doktor. To be honest, I don't know anything about bachelor and master because medical universities don't have that kind of system, but since it's a standardized system for Europe, maybe somebody else can explain it :)

I can tell you more about my university and the process to become a doctor. In total it takes you 6 years to study medicine - the first 5 years are lectures and practical courses and the last year is called Klinisch-Praktisches Jahr (clinical-practical year) where you work in a hospital. You also have to write a dissertation to get your diploma. At the end you get the title Dr. med. univ., which equals MD, I believe.
Then you are a Turnusarzt in the hospital for three years, which is similar to interns like in Grey's Anatomy, you do all the shitty work and the night shifts. After those years you are a general doctor and you can either open a practice or stay in hospital and continue your eduction to Facharzt (medical specialist). That length of that eduction depends on the specialty, I think for neurosurgery it's six years.
And after that, when you are old, you are finally finished.
You can also study for an additional title, PhD, which enables you to do self-employed scientific research.

I should also mention that as a public university, we don't pay tuition fees. We used to pay about 300 Euro per semester, but that was changed a couple of years ago to have free education. Many people and political parties want free education and no access restriction. I am personally against that because in my opinion those people don't think about it, how should our country finance free education for everybody who wants to study? And it's not only for Austrians, that way we also finance the eduction for all the Germans who come here to study. It's all a big discussion ;)

I hope this was not too complicated and I'm looking forward to read your posts!