If you want to escape the threatening everyday routine after your studies, you may well come up with the idea of ​​traveling.

After this phase of my life, I was also gripped by the desire to travel and so I ended up in Tamil Nadu in southern India, the home of my friend Vishnoo.

After just one visit, I can confirm what my more well-travelled classmates had been preaching long before: everything is different in India – from the stunning food to the dizzying traffic.

In Chinnamanur, a small town in Tamil Nadu, we are invited by one of Vishnoo's friends to an idyllic coconut plantation, where hard work is done during the day, but in the evening you can only hear the faint hum of traffic in the distance.

This is where the whole group of Vishnoo's former bachelor classmates and fellow sufferers gather before a wedding to see each other again.

Not everything is different in India.

The stories from the engineering college in Madurai, where everyone studied, are numerous and colourful, so a comparison between Indian and German universities naturally suggests itself.

India has 864 universities, more than twice as many as Germany, and there are also thousands of colleges.

Altogether, India has around 35 million students, so it is clear that the experiences of this group of six cannot possibly be taken as representative of what is certainly a diverse higher education landscape.

Nevertheless, they show how different our student worlds are and where there are similarities.

Here are the three biggest anomalies that I was able to get to know that evening:

In India, a bachelor's degree usually lasts four years, while a full master's degree can be added in two years.

The Indian university system is based on the British one and the lessons themselves are mostly held in English.

Which examination performances are required for the successful completion of a degree is not as strictly standardized as in Germany.

The requirements vary from course to course, but also from university to university.

So I was complained about the suffering of the students in Madurai, who not only had to write a bachelor thesis with their own work project, but also had to defend it.

Legend has it that students at other colleges could get away with a light bundle of exams fairly cheaply.

Of course, it is possible that the examinations in India are really so diverse, but in the latter case it could also be a kind of dreamed-of student paradise, where the lecturers are always fair and the examination offices are always accommodating and punctual.

This wishful thinking is also known from everyday student life in Germany, it also comes to life here in Germany whenever an unpleasant deadline is approaching.