Tsinghua vs HPI

I’m spending a semester at Tsinghua University as a visiting student, and that’s why I thought that it’d be interesting to compare it with my home university, the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam/Berlin. These are my subjective first impressions and observations after two and a half weeks at Tsinghua, so things might change by the end of the semester.

Tsinghua is commonly called the “MIT of Asia/China”, they produce world-class research, and you need to score top 0.1% on the Gaokao to get in. HPI is quite different: it’s a small, CS-only institute in Germany with 800 students from first year bachelor to PhDs. It’s privately financed (with no tuition) by the SAP founder Hasso Plattner. In Germany, it’s one of the more selective universities as well (although nowhere near Tsinghua), and one of the major players in CS.

What Tsinghua does particularly well

There were quite a few things that positively surprised me at Tsinghua. Some of them are just novelty or structural differences (50,000 vs. 800 students), but I believe that there are still some lessons for us to learn.

• Up-to-date lectures: Professors talk about model releases that happened a few days ago, use random X posts in their slides, and everybody in general is talking about LLMs even if the lecture is not about LLMs. Some of this might be explained by having mostly taken more foundational courses back at home, but still. Even the slides that feel 15 years old mention how they relate to the current frontier.
• Professor spinoffs: This is very anecdotal, but I had the feeling that every second professor has some kind of startup on the side. Robotics, chip design, video models, or a straight-up frontier lab — Tang Jie, the founder of Z.ai (GLM models), is teaching one of my courses.
• Incredible breadth: HPI is probably one of the worst examples here (after all, we’re CS-only), but it’s very refreshing to see the range of courses one can take here at Tsinghua. I’m literally taking an introductory nuclear reactor engineering course just because it sounded like a fun rabbit hole. Technically, HPI students can also take courses at any university in Berlin, but it feels like nobody really does it (except for math).
• Interdisciplinary thinking: This kind of follows from the previous point. I made the mistake of enrolling in the CS Department, just to find out that many of the interesting courses were offered by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences (IIIS). I always kind of missed this at HPI, even though we get more and more professors.
• Research focus: I have the suspicion that by the time the average Tsinghua student graduates, they have already written at least four or five “mini papers”. In multiple lectures, a significant portion of the grade came from a project that very closely resembled a mini paper. You were mostly free to pick your own topic, but you could also just ask for one. Oh, and this also often meant no exam. At HPI, the first time I was exposed to something resembling research was my thesis, and we would always have an exam (even if the lecturer “did not want it”).
• Engineered environment: It feels like life at Tsinghua is heavily engineered. There are huge dorms with little privacy, but enormous capacity and affordable rent (~110€/month). There are very cheap dining halls, but they’re only open for two hours during lunch and have incredible rush-hour capacity. Roads are closed to cars, and bikes line up in front of the lecture halls so that people can get to the dining halls as quickly as possible. The on-campus Chagee (think of Starbucks for tea) only sells low-caffeine drinks after 5pm. The list goes on, and it often feels like you’re nudged into a pre-defined routine.
• People literally live here: This one is not completely new; after all, HPI students are infamous for staying on campus for weeks. Yet, given that Tsinghua is more or less a “gated community” and a lot more people live on campus, campus life just hits different. In the evening, you see people everywhere: playing sports, sitting on the football field, doing things. At HPI, 10pm is usually dead silent.

What Tsinghua makes me appreciate about HPI

After a long list of things Tsinghua does somewhat better than HPI, there are still a few things that make me appreciate home more:

• Campus: Probably the most obvious, but the HPI campus is hard to beat. It’s pretty, functional, and clean (very clean toilets and showers everywhere). The Tsinghua campus has higher variance — some newer buildings are nice (though nowhere near HPI), and some straight up look like a high school about to be renovated.
• English-compatibility: It’s probably not easy at HPI if you don’t speak German, but I still have the feeling that most things are bilingual — the systems, emails, events, lectures, etc. At Tsinghua, even some lectures are challenging to follow in English. Oh, and most systems are going to be in Chinese.
• Organization: I used to criticize the administration at HPI, but Tsinghua is on a different level. Something as simple as registering for courses took weeks and countless emails. We got an intro to the registration system 40 minutes after registration had opened (and everything was full within a minute). I originally managed to get zero courses on registration day. Some people had no courses to even choose from. People are generally helpful and usually there is a solution, but you definitely need to be high-agency (and patient). Oh, and get used to texting your professors on WeChat — it feels surprisingly similar to WhatsApp.
• Attendance & recordings: At Tsinghua, the standard seems to be mandatory attendance and no recordings. At HPI, mandatory attendance is generally banned and roughly half of the lectures are recorded. Much more accommodating.

These were my first impressions after just two weeks here. I expect to change my mind on some of these, but that is also one of the reasons why I wanted to write them down.