I am having my "mood down" period at the moment. The length of my studies till the equivalent of a Master of Science will be around 5 years and I am gonna need around 6 years, so 12 semesters and thats normal in Germany for mechanical engineering.
I have been onto it for 3 years now and having a down at the moment. Normally I wrote around 4-5 exams per semester and was successful in 80+ % of them, but at the moment I tend to sign up for only 1 - 2 exams and tend to chill more in the time between. It have been very taxing 3 years, I had to work / study / do internships and write about 40 exams, cause they reformed our university system and they sucked at it. Now they need to reform the reform and reform the new reform again.
The workload tho wasnt the problem that is only taxing and can prevent you from doing other things; the whole things I learnt, I find quite intresting and in combination with working in a student job in my field besides university, I have heard the challenging call of the business world and want to dig deeper into it now, resulting in me heavily concentrating on my job and neglecting my studies.
We had that lesson lately called "Project Management". Ok that's intresting. But the exams resulted in us having to learn a 500 page long book that came with the lesson and that contained alot of useful stuff but more stuff that was not useful. You had to learn things like basic communication, you maybe have heard of the communication model by Paul Watzlawik that categorizes two people conversing in the "Sender", "the message" and "the receiver". That was like basic knowledge and maybe thats important for some people to learn, so I accepted it. I just didnt understand, why it had to be done via a 500 page long book that relayed so many unecassry information, making your head explode.
I passed the exam with a C+ tho and after it I burnt the book.
I am with substitute alot about his presentation about the british university system, a lot of that counts for the german one aswell.
I nowadays think: in Germany you have the ability to join a Fachhochschule. There you get a Bachelor or Master degree aswell, but in less time, with less information and knowledge and the whole thing is more practical oriented. There you can for example become an engineer, who geographically measures cities and coordinates building projects.
The whole thing there is far less theorethical than at a university and you are finished faster. You only earn less money afterwards and never can become a PhD. But I dont know, fuck the PhD, I think the Fachhochschule would have been the thing for me.