An Academic’s Guide to Fribourg

Tags: academia, musings

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As my research group starts to take root in Fribourg, I finally get to take the time to note some things I like about the region and the university. Much of this is inspired by Matt Might, whose article on getting tenure ends very poignantly:

And come to the University of Utah! Life is good here.

Without further ado, let me sing the praises of Fribourg and its environs:

  1. Fribourg is a literal university town, with more than a quarter of its inhabitants being students. In some sense, the city is the campus. Plus, it is a small town and highly walkable.
  2. The canton (i.e. the administrative unit, akin to a county) of Fribourg is bilingual, with most inhabitants speaking German and French as a native language. Since the city is so international, everyone of course also speaks English.
  3. While Switzerland has higher costs of living than most countries, Fribourg (both the city and the canton) offers affordable accommodations and in general has lower costs of living.
  4. The whole region is well-connected, with major cities like Geneva or Bern just a short train ride away. As one of my colleagues so nicely put it: ‘Switzerland is so small that almost all cities are suburbs of each other.’
  5. Switzerland in general sports cities with a high quality of life. Whether you like the cosmopolitan nightlife or the solitude of mountains, there is something for you.

In terms of the university as such, we offer a large variety of subjects, ranging from the humanities to the life sciences. While we are not as big as our sibling universities ETH Zurich or EPFL, we are doing very well. For machine learning (including deep learning) and information retrieval/data mining, we are ranked 3rd in Switzerland and in the top 50 of all European universities.1

Given our small size (just compare our faculty sizes to that of other universities), that is quite a feat, in my opinion! Thus, I can only echo Matt’s statements:

Come to the University of Fribourg. Life is good here.

  1. When viewing these rankings, you might have to switch the region of comparison manually, since CSRankings unfortunately has the tendency to default to your current location. ↩︎