M.Sc. Automotive Engineering

The bachelor in Hanover was mechatronics — deliberately broad, mechanical and electrical and software in one degree. The master narrowed it. Automotive engineering at TUM, with the focus areas that decided everything after: advanced driver assistance and automated driving on one side, electric powertrain and control theory on the other.

Those two look like separate interests and are not. Automated driving is a control problem wearing a perception problem as a hat. The vehicle dynamics work I had done at Formula Student and at Volkswagen is the layer the autonomy sits on top of, and understanding both ends of that stack is most of why the systems engineering work later made sense to me.

Four years, and four jobs

The dates say April 2020 to February 2024, which is roughly twice as long as this degree takes. That is because I never did it on its own.

BMW, then Blickfeld, then Argo AI, then Plus — the master ran underneath all of them. The two theses on this timeline were both done inside industry projects rather than beside them, and by the time I submitted the final one I had been working as a systems engineer for over a year.

I would not recommend the schedule to anyone, and I would not trade what it produced. Every concept I met in a lecture had something in the day job to attach itself to, which is a very different way of learning than encountering it clean. It is also where the habit of asking what is this actually for came from — a question that turns out to be most of the job description now.