Zurich Crime Application: Fill & Download for Free

9 years ETH. 4 years Stanford. Some key differences in the way the schools work.Admission. ETH traditionally has no selection process like in the US. Swiss kids that pass the “Matura” at the end of high school can attend ETH. Others need to prove equivalency. All that is required for most Master Programs is “registration” (some do require “application” [1]) MIT and CalTech have a human-driven selection process and a very limited number of admissions (MIT: 7% of applicants). Many people who would be qualified will not get in due to non-academic factors, like luck, financials, and possibly affirmative action criteria.Exams: The selection comes later and is based solely on your performance at ETH. Failure rates in exams can be up to 50%. Also, you may have one 4h final exam for a year worth of classes at the end of the summer break - which means you will be studying all summer. US universities believe their selection process was great, and a much smaller percentage drops out due to bad grades. Exams are at the end of the semester, then you have the summer off for internships or whatever.Financials: ETH is (close to) free. Tuition is a few hundred bucks, and you may qualify to get even that waived. ETH is (mostly) in the middle of Zurich and has no campus living. You need to find your own housing. There are plenty of students shared housing arrangements, but they are student managed. There is cheap and healthy food offered at the school. But Zurich is expensive to live in, compared to most other places in the world. Tuition at US universities is a few ten thousand bucks, but you can live on campus.PhD: There are no PhD “students” at ETH. Once you have your Masters, you are no longer considered a student. You don’t take classes anymore, and there are no more exams, until your PhD defense. You are considered part of the academic staff. You get paid like a staff member, and are involved in teaching and research and in charge of your own career.Language: ETH (and living in Zurich) requires some fluency in German, especially for the lower level courses. You _might_ be fine with broken German for PhD level studies - as you no longer take classes - but it may limit how much you are involved in teaching.City: I lived in Zurich and in Boston. Zurich (marketing) calls itself “Little Big City”. It has pretty much everything Boston or any big city has, but is much smaller, has better weather, more efficient public transport, less crime, more liberal politics in most aspects, etc.Quality of Education: It’s equivalent. In general, you probably will get a broader education at ETH, and spend more time on fundamentals of engineering. In the US, you may specialize sooner. As a hiring manager, I know any ETH CS grad is going to be very solid. Curricula change over time, but back when I did CS at ETH, a lot of EE, Physics, and even Mechanical Engineering was required.Quality of Research: For PhD, it really depends on the group/adviser you join. ETH has some world class research going on [2]. One difference is that scientific research is generally easier funded in Switzerland (or most of Europe). Professors in the US are sometimes paid for teaching only, and they need to raise funds for research through grants. A Swiss professor will have enough budget with her position for a small research group. Thus professors in Switzerland spend a lot less time raising funds than they do in the US as their job comes with some basic funding. This allows them to support some research maybe without having to line up some funding agency first.Access to Industry: Switzerland has some interesting industry, but in general it’s no comparison to California or Massachusetts. There is a Google office in Zurich, and IBM has a research lab close. But there a lot of people graduating from ETH and then moving to the US for work.Continuing in the US after graduation: With an ETH degree, you will have to explain in the US what you did. For example, ETH has little grade inflation. With a 5.8 out of 6, you may be top 1% in your class, maybe the top student. The average in your exam was 4.2 out of 6. 34% failed. But US universities translate that 5.8 to a 3.8, or an A-, and that doesn’t sound so good anymore.If you study in the US, you will have a better network, internships, etc. in the US. Depending on your national origin/visa situation, it may be easier to continue from a US university to a job in the US. Of course, if you are a US citizen, that is no concern.Edit: grammar, spelling, typosEdits in celebration of 1000 upvotes: Two footnotes below and some rewrite of the research section. Thanks to Abhishek Grewal for edit suggestions[1] Turns out the MS CS program at ETH now has an admission process, but it’s not clear it’s selective. It seems to be mostly making sure applicants are qualified. The 3 year BS CS still only requires Swiss “Matura” or equivalence and that will qualify you for the MS program.[2] Google for your fields of interest, but it includes 32 associated Nobel Laureates (MIT 97, CalTech 74)

I’m British and have been living in Switzerland for 40 years.The Swiss have a bizarre relationship with the concept of humility. I lost count a long time ago of the number of Swiss colleagues I had who were in jobs they hated but who didn’t dare approach the departments they truly wanted to work for. This would, according to them, have been too arrogant. So they wasted years hoping that someone in that department would ‘notice’ them.In the same vein, my own daughter was put under massive pressure at business school to write job applications without using the pronoun ‘I’.The Swiss do an incredible amount of good around the world, especially behind-the-scenes mediation work between jostling or warring nations. But in the name of humility, they don't talk about it. As a result I spend a lot of time defending Switzerland when I’m abroad. Foreigners often perceive the Swiss as a bunch of courteous, penny-pinching, chocolate-munching control freaks. This stereotype is unjustified. Talking about the good you do is not the same as bragging about it. The Swiss need to speak up.Many people, especially women, perceive the Swiss schooling system as a plot to stop them working. Cantines are rare and timetables from one school to the next aren’t coordinated. So one of the parents often has no option but to look after the kids.There have been some improvements over the years but inequality in practice between men and women is still a big issue. To give you some idea of the progress, my wife’s occupation was recorded thirty years ago by local authorities (Valais area) as ‘Her husband’s housework/household’ (Le ménage de son mari; note that ‘ménage’ translates both housework and household). That wouldn’t happen today but I still hear Swiss women discussing their respective jobs and saying things like ‘I earn X francs an hour, which is quite good for a woman’.This is a beautiful, well-kept, well-educated, highly organised country. Crime is lower than elsewhere and the unemployment rate, which the Swiss calculate with a tighter scope than elsewhere, is perceived to be much lower than its neighbours’. That doesn’t stop alcoholism, suicide, drug consumption, over-50s unemployment and CO2 emissions from being significant concerns here too.Improvisation isn’t part of the culture. Suddenly saying ‘how about a quick drink?’ at the end of a working day won’t attract many takers. This is because Swiss people are fully booked. I remember asking a colleague in Zurich a few years ago if he’d fancy a drink after work. It was no big deal. Thirty minutes at most. He answered ‘Yes, sure’, took out his phone and suggested a date three weeks into the future. Then came the killer: ‘But I’ll only have time for one round’.Switzerland has a reputation for being efficient. I have seen much evidence to the contrary. The fact that the Swiss work long hours and obsess about getting every last detail right might make them effective, but it doesn’t make them efficient.Maintaining appearances is a big deal in Switzerland. Something that is clean or organised also has to look that way. Take begging, for example. Beyond safety and compassion, appearances need to be included in the reasons why you’ll rarely see people asking for money on the streets of this nation. Yes, Switzerland has its poor, too. I first became personally aware of this when I got into a conversation with a doctor in one of Switzerland’s sparkling ski resorts. He explained that he had to deal with the health consequences of imbalanced eating habits among elderly people struggling to get by on the basic state pension (AVS). Switzerland’s official poverty (“precarity”) rate in 2019 is higher than 8% of the population.The Swiss take themselves seriously and humour of any kind isn’t expected in everyday life. This is why the Swiss tend to check after a joke or a quip that you understood they were trying to be funny. The fact that you didn’t smile or laugh anyway is treated as insufficient evidence. More generally, although Switzerland has a few brilliant comedians (e.g. Yann Lambiel, Jean-Louis Droz, Joseph Gorgoni, Emil Steinberger), Swiss humour is mostly a contradiction in terms.NOTE > Many thanks for all your comments.

Images : Google | Mehul Choksi In IndiaImagine a scene from an old Bollywood movie where police arrive long after the crime is committed. Later in the movie, we learn than the politician was a business partner of the criminal. The politician delayed the police long enough to let his friend escape.Alas, in Mehul Choksi’s and Nirav Modi’s case, it wasn’t a movie but a reality show that played out in India in perfectly movie-like synchronization. Here is an excerpt that throws light on the event as they unfolded.The plan to flee had been chalked out months in advance. The application of at least six Indians (Anituguan authorities won't specify who these are) was processed in June 2017, the citizenship to Choksi granted in November. CBI sources had confirmed to DailyO that the Modi-Choksi clan had fled in the first week of January.To be precise, Nirav Modi left January 1 for Dubai, his brother Nischal for Brussels also on the same day, Mehul Choksi left on January 4 for Dubai and the last off the airport was Ami Modi, a US citizen and Nirav Modi's wife, who fled to Zurich.What's important is Choksi was travelling on an Indian passport. Its only after all of them were comfortably ensconced abroad did the Punjab National Bank inform the stock exchanges and the CBI decided to act.[1][1][1][1]As that wasn’t clear enough, the Enforcement Directorate issued a request for Red Corner Notice to Interpol despite knowing that it would be rejected—because formal charge sheet wasn’t yet filed. Earlier in case of Lalit Modi, Interpol has refused to issue an RCN (Red Corner Notice) for want of evidence.Now comes the best part. Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne confirmed that Mehul Choksi was indeed present in the country as a citizen under the country’s Citizenship for Investment Programme.Further, in an interview to Mumbai Mirror,[2][2][2][2] their Foreign Minister E P Chet Greene said that the Antigua government was prepared to sit with India and discuss the issue but added that the Modi government has not made any extradition request. Moreover, he told neither the CBI nor the ED has written to his government seeking information on Choksi’s whereabouts.Now why an upright and corruption-free Modi government wouldn't take interest in extraditing Mehul Choksi who committed a $2 billion fraud ?Guess what, your guess is as good as mine!Edit - 3rd August 2018Today, the news is that several departments cleared the name of Mehul Choksi to certify that their was no adverse information prior to granting his citizenship. I guess having friends as high places has its perks.They said police clearance certificate from the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs Regional Passport Office, Mumbai, certified that there was no adverse information against Mr. Mehul Chinubbhai Choksi which would render him ineligible for grant of travel facilities including visa for Antigua and Barbuda.Footnotes[1] A failure of due process: How Mehul Choksi-Nirav Modi planned the great escape[1] A failure of due process: How Mehul Choksi-Nirav Modi planned the great escape[1] A failure of due process: How Mehul Choksi-Nirav Modi planned the great escape[1] A failure of due process: How Mehul Choksi-Nirav Modi planned the great escape[2] Exclusive: No request yet for Mehul Choksi from India, foreign minister of Antigua and Barbuda tells Mirror[2] Exclusive: No request yet for Mehul Choksi from India, foreign minister of Antigua and Barbuda tells Mirror[2] Exclusive: No request yet for Mehul Choksi from India, foreign minister of Antigua and Barbuda tells Mirror[2] Exclusive: No request yet for Mehul Choksi from India, foreign minister of Antigua and Barbuda tells Mirror