Courses at Czech Technical University in Prague
The 2nd year has several pre-determined ECTS, currently 48 out of 60 to be exact. That leaves the option for only 12 ECTS to be chosen as courses. One option could be to choose ITER and the Accompanying Programme for 4 ECTS along with an Advanced Laboratory Project for 12 ECTS. The former usually requires you to give a detailed 30-min presentation about new developments on a certain engineering topic on ITER (e.g. Heating methods) while the latter can be quite complicated. Other options can be found on a list posted each year by the CTU Nuclear Dept., which you can acquire by contacting your local coordinator Jan Mlynar (mlynar@ipp.cas.cz).
Advanced Laboratory Project[edit]
This project requires you to select a topic upon which to perform research on the GOLEM tokamak which is located in the CTU. The complicated part comes with the fact that most aspects of this project require you to take initiative. You will need to search on the GOLEM wiki for past projects in order to choose a topic, or think of a new one and discuss its feasibility with your supervisor for the course. Therefore, it is recommended to also try and find a personal supervisor for your project with the help of the course's supervisor (Vojtech Svoboda : Vojtech.Svoboda@fjfi.cvut.cz) to help you throughout this project. This project is supposed to last both semesters (hence the 8 ECTS) and usually requires an initial presentation upon the chosen topic, a written report and a presentation in the end along with the extensive lab measurements and data analysis that you will perform in the meantime, unless agreed upon otherwise.
GOLEM is a great opportunity for students to try and experiment hands-on in the oldest currently operational tokamak in the world, which can also be operated remotely, thus serving as an excellent educational tool. This project can be very interesting but do not underestimated the bulk of work it requires. If your chosen thesis topic is heavy and difficult, it might be better to try and search for alternative courses to replace it with. In any case, it can not be stressed enough that you need to work and take a lot of initiatives on your own, no matter the amount of supervisors available.
