If you are a student weighing an exchange semester at EPFL and you are trying to work out how to fund it, where you will live, how the courses actually work, and how to come away with more than a transcript, this post is for you. It is the guide I wish I had found before I went.
I spent the autumn and winter of 2025 on exchange at EPFL, in Lausanne, from September to January. Unlike some experiences abroad, this one was not a story of scraping by. EPFL is one of the best technical universities in the world, the funding on offer is genuinely good if you go after it, the city is built for a bike, and there is a research culture you can plug straight into. So this guide leans practical rather than confessional. It is less "here is what went wrong" and more "here is how to get the most out of a genuinely great setup," with the friction concentrated in the few places it really lives, mainly securing housing and navigating enrollment.
One thing to hold in mind throughout: my case is a Catalan student coming from UPC, and some of the specifics, especially credit recognition and which scholarships you can chase, depend on your home university and where you are from. I will flag those moments so you check your own situation rather than trusting mine.
The money: stack all four scholarships
Start here, because the pleasant surprise of EPFL is that a well-organised exchange student can be comfortably funded, and the way you get there is by stacking several scholarships rather than relying on one. As a Catalan student at a UPC-type university, I was able to go after four, and I would tell you to chase every one you are eligible for. The single most useful habit in this whole section is refusing to self-eliminate.
SEMP is the Swiss counterpart to Erasmus, and it goes to essentially everyone on the exchange automatically. For me it was 2,200 CHF, paid in one lump shortly after classes began, in early September. They warn in theory that someone could be left out, but in practice everyone on the program got it. Treat it as your baseline.
Becas Santander paid 1,500 EUR, arriving in early November. This one is a separate, competitive application: a limited number of slots allocated by grade ranking, open to Spanish students at selected universities. Here is the cautionary tale that became my rule for the whole section. Several of my friends did not even apply, because it was unclear whether Switzerland was covered, and someone at UPC international relations told them it was not. It was. So apply to everything you can, and when you get a discouraging or uncertain answer, verify it yourself before you accept it. A secondhand "you are not eligible" cost some capable people real money.
The Heyning-Roelli Foundation was the big one, and the one with the most craft to it. Apply early, because the deadline is around April, well ahead of the others (their site is heyning-roelli-stiftung.ch). It is aimed at excellent students with limited budgets, and it is explicitly designed to cover what the other scholarships and your family's savings cannot. You apply with a motivation letter that explains why you need the support and states the specific amount you are requesting, and you attach proof of financial need. In my case I attached my mother's payroll. You hear back around July with the decision and the amount. I requested around 3,000 CHF and was granted their maximum, 4,000.
One condition matters, and I want to give it to you straight because getting it right is both the honest path and the safe one. The foundation asks you to tell them if you receive other scholarships. Because I later got the Santander, I reported it, and my award was reduced from 4,000 to 3,400. So the practical, legitimate advice is this: request the amount you genuinely need, aim high within reason since there is a cap, write a strong and specific motivation letter that makes the case for real need, and understand that other funding you report can reduce the award. A well-built case framed around genuine need is what carries weight here. Be honest with them; it is a need-based charity, and you are applying under your own name.
MOBINT-MIF, run by AGAUR, paid 1,000 EUR. It is grade-based by ranges, with many slots, open to Catalan students at selected universities. Almost everyone I know who applied received it. Two things to know. It is slow: applications open around October and are not resolved until roughly May. And it is really slow to pay: as of August 2026, with my stay having ended back in January, I still had not been paid. So expect this money long after you are home, and do not count on it for cash flow while you are actually there.
Now the honest bottom line, because it is the near-opposite of what you might fear about Switzerland's reputation for being expensive. Across the four, I received roughly 2,200 CHF plus 1,500 EUR plus 3,400 CHF plus 1,000 EUR, which converts to somewhere around 8,000 CHF of funding. Against that, my essential costs were low: about 510 CHF a month for housing and around 150 CHF a month for food, over five months. So EPFL was comfortably funded for me. But that comfort came because I lived frugally, studying hard and travelling little. Europe is right there and tempting, and a student who travels heavily around it will spend far more, and the funding will stop feeling generous fast. The framing to take away: EPFL is one of the better-funded exchanges you can do if you chase all four scholarships, and whether it feels comfortable is mostly a question of how much you travel.
Housing: the FMEL is heaven to live in and a headache to secure
Housing is where most of the stress of an EPFL exchange lives, and it is worth understanding early, because the timing of what you do here matters more than almost anything else.
The prize is the FMEL, a foundation that runs a network of student residences across Lausanne, shared between EPFL and UNIL students. I lived in one called Bourdonette; there are others like Vortex, which sits very close to campus, and Atrium. Why is it heaven? The quality is excellent and the price is roughly a third of the private market, because the residences are government-subsidised. I paid about 510 CHF a month for a big private room in a flat of four, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a shared kitchen and living area, around ten minutes from campus. For Lausanne, that is remarkable value, and it is why everyone wants in.
And that is exactly why it is a headache. Because the residences are shared across two large universities and priced so far below market, demand hugely outstrips supply. You join a queue, and the priority system is genuinely opaque; even the FMEL cannot fully explain how it orders people. They try to prioritise short-term Erasmus students, but it is not guaranteed, and master's students often sit lower and miss out. It is entirely possible to arrive in Lausanne without an assigned room.
So here is what to actually do. The moment you receive your EPFL confirmation or invitation letter, which arrives around mid-April, join the FMEL queue. Do not wait. And then the single trick that made the difference for me, which is worth understanding rather than just copying. I started out by setting 1 September as a strict move-in date, because that was my ideal, the day the semester really begins. The problem, and this is my guess rather than something the FMEL told me, is that almost everyone wants to start on exactly that date, so 1 September is a bottleneck, the single hardest day to be assigned a room. Meanwhile the students moving out do so at the end of June or in July, which means rooms are actually sitting empty earlier in the summer. When I called the FMEL in mid-July, worried I would not secure anything, they advised two changes: do not set a strict move-in date, make it flexible, something like plus or minus one or two months around your preferred date, and set it earlier, around 1 August. I did exactly that, 1 August with a one-month margin, and it worked almost immediately. It was genuinely funny: on 17 July I received an offer to move in on 16 July, the day before. There were empty rooms waiting to be assigned the whole time; the queue only felt impossible because everyone was fighting for a September start. So the takeaway is a flexible, earlier move-in date, not a strict September one. Being flexible may mean paying for a few weeks before you would ideally move in, but the certainty of having a room is worth it many times over. Be aware the deposit is two months of rent, so budget for that up front.
If you do arrive without a room, do not panic, because there are fallbacks. Airbnb is the default bridge. There are hostels. There is a residence called Les Estudiantines that offers temporary housing precisely for people who arrive without a place. And Facebook Marketplace has short-stay listings. Use these to buy yourself time while you keep working the FMEL queue and other leads.
One sharp warning, because the scams here are more sophisticated than you would expect. Even through the official EPFL Telegram channels, I came across a supposed master's student subletting a room who showed me a rental contract, an EPFL student ID, and a live video tour of the place. It was still a scam, and I only caught it before paying. The lesson is uncomfortable but important: no amount of documentation proves a listing is real. A contract, an ID, and a live video can all be faked or stolen. So the rule is not about which channel you use, since even the official EPFL Telegram had this. The rule is never send money beforehand. Never pay until you are one hundred percent sure and have real, earned trust in the person, and never let FOMO or a sense of hurry push you into transferring anything. The scammers rely on exactly that panic about running out of options. A place you have not fully verified is not a place worth rushing money at, no matter how tight the search feels.
The university: enrollment, credits, and how hard it really is
Once you are funded and housed, the machinery of actually studying at EPFL is straightforward once you understand its two quirks: a generous shopping period, and a recognition rule you must not trip over.
First, credits and recognition, and here is where you must check your own faculty rather than copy mine. My UPC setup was a bag of 30 optional credits with free choice, so there was no strict one-to-one matching and I could take almost anything and have it count. That is my case, not a universal rule. Some faculties require you to match courses far more strictly, so confirm how your home university handles recognition before you build any plans on top of it.
You are free to choose, but you formalise your choices in a learning agreement, and the good news is that it can be modified during EPFL's enrollment window, so it does not lock you in prematurely. There is one rule you genuinely must respect, because getting it wrong means losing the credits. Your home university will not recognise language courses, nor courses whose content is already covered by something you have passed. For example, UPC's Mathematics I already covers linear algebra and graph theory, so re-taking linear algebra at EPFL would not be recognised. You can still enroll in such a course, but it will not count back home. So choose genuinely new material, avoid overlap with what you have already passed, and skip language courses if you need the credits recognised.
Now the enrollment mechanic itself, which is more relaxed than it first appears. You do a first registration before you arrive, around mid-August. But enrollment does not actually close until two weeks after classes start, which means you can add and drop even after courses have begun. Most people deliberately over-enroll, sample a lot of courses in the first fortnight, then narrow down. Think of it as a shopping period. The fixed deadline is that two-week mark, after which your schedule locks, and that is when you update your learning agreement to match your final choices. All that freedom can feel overwhelming, and the urge to try everything is strong, so the advice is simple: stay calm, read the course descriptions and the professors, and settle on the ones that genuinely fit you.
As an exchange student in your fourth year, you map to master's level, because Swiss bachelors are three years, but you can pick across departments and even programs. I was in computer science and took two courses from the mathematics master's. Some courses are restricted, but EPFL gives you a full guide of what is open and what is not, so you are not left guessing. To make this concrete, my 30 credits broke down as Machine Learning, a master's course shared across several programs including computer science, at 8 credits; Mathematical Modeling of Behavior and Causal Thinking, both from mathematics, at 5 credits each; and a Research Project in Computer Science at 12 credits. So three taught courses plus a substantial research project, which is a deliberately research-weighted, lighter-lecture semester. You could weight yours more toward coursework if you skip the big project, but I would think hard before doing that, for reasons I will come to next.
A word on difficulty, because it is the thing people worry about most. The courses are hard, roughly UPC-level or a little harder, and they feel more compact because you are trying to do a lot in less time alongside everything else the semester offers. Grading runs from 1 to 6, and you pass at 4. Here is the detail that should reassure you: in a lot of courses, even when they do not say so explicitly, the grading follows a Gaussian curve. That is my and my friends' observation rather than official policy, so treat it as such, but the practical effect is that exams are brutally hard and you prepare a great deal, yet grades tend to come out well in the end. Do not let the difficulty of the exams themselves scare you off.
Take the research project: my semester with the Scala team
If there is one piece of advice in this guide I would underline, it is this: take the Research Project in Computer Science. It is the highest-leverage choice on the whole menu, and it is how an exchange becomes more than a set of exams.
The idea is simple. There is an optional research project, worth 12 credits, with an 8-credit version as well, that you carry out in collaboration with a professor or lab, either at EPFL or even outside it. You get a lot of autonomy, you work on something you actually care about, and you can end up doing genuinely state-of-the-art work. My one piece of tactical advice: start looking a full semester ahead. Strong options exist beyond EPFL too, for instance the Swiss Data Science Center and similar institutions run excellent projects, so cast a wide net. I will be honest that I did not do this well myself. I did not even know the research project existed until I was already there, so I had to scramble, emailing labs and professors and catching them after lectures. It worked out, but do not copy the scramble. Give yourself time.
Here is how I landed mine, told as a repeatable move rather than luck. The Scala team is based at EPFL, since the Scala compiler is developed there, and they had an open issue on their GitHub tracker that genuinely interested me. I replied to it. That put me in contact with Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, we had a meeting, and it became my research project. The lesson is that an open issue on a team's tracker is an invitation, and answering one thoughtfully is a completely legitimate way in.
The work itself showed me what research actually feels like. I was assigned a PhD student and we had weekly meetings, with milestones to hit before the winter holidays, but real autonomy to set my own goals along the way, and missing a milestone was never treated as a crisis. There was one fixed target: to fix the issue and land a Scala Improvement Process before the research-project deadline. In plain terms, the compiler had a critical crash that had been patched in a naive, not-quite-right way. Doing it properly was hard; it needed a rigorous proof, and I worked that out. You do not need to understand the internals to feel the shape of it: a real bug, in a real language, with a quick fix that was not good enough, and a proper solution that required proving something true.
What it gave me is the reason I am pushing you toward it. It was my first big project outside academia, work that affects millions of developers, now a Scala Improvement Process that will help define how the language behaves going forward. That is not just a line on a CV. It is a real contribution, and a first genuine look at how production-critical software actually works. If you want your exchange to leave you with something like that, the research project is where it comes from.
Getting around Lausanne
Daily life in Lausanne is easy to organise, and getting around is mostly a question of choosing the right transport pass for your actual habits, then filling the gaps with a bike.
The city is green and well served: two metro lines, one running into the city and beyond, one inside Lausanne down to the lake, plus a lot of bus lines. It works well, but it is not cheap, so matching your pass to how you really move saves real money. Everything below is from autumn and winter 2025 and prices change, so confirm the current figures on the operator's site before you buy. As a baseline, a single one-zone ticket, the most basic fare with no discount, was around 4.40 CHF.
Against that baseline, there are four options worth knowing, each with a clear "worth it if." The half-fare card, the demi, costs about 120 CHF and then halves the price of every single ticket, which pays off if you take the metro most days, such as a daily commute. The monthly pass runs roughly 50 to 60 CHF a month and is worth it if you are on the metro or buses intensively, several times a day or every day. The night pass is about 90 CHF for a full year of free public transport across all of Switzerland during the night ring, roughly 9pm to 9am (check the exact hours), and here is the catch that decides it: you can only buy it as a yearlong pass, so it is a clear win if you are staying a full year and murkier for a single semester, since you would be paying for twelve months to use maybe five. Some people even timed trips to fall inside the night window so the pass covered them, though for long daytime journeys only the night pass stretches that far, a monthly does not. Finally, there is a day pass at around 80 CHF for unlimited travel for a day, and its trick is that it splits: four people share it for about 20 each, which makes it the group-trip option rather than something you buy alone.
The reason all of this matters less than you might think is the trains. Swiss rail is superb, and you can reach basically any city in the country by train, which is what makes the night pass and the day pass worth considering for anyone who wants to travel.
What I actually did is the worked example. I lived close to campus, so I bought a bike. One of the EPFL associations sells them for 100 CHF and buys them back for 50 when you return one, which is a genuinely good deal for a semester or two. I rode to campus daily, and I bought the half-fare card mainly because I went to the airport about four times, roughly 30 CHF a trip, about 15 with the demi, plus a bit of transport up from the city, since Lausanne is steep. For nights out in the city I took the metro, because climbing back up on a bike after an evening out is no joke. So my combination was a bike for the daily commute and a half-fare card for airport runs and city trips, with no monthly needed because I was not a heavy everyday transit user. And honestly, Lausanne is a lovely place to cycle: green, not many cars, and the bike doubled as exercise, which is why I loved it.
Beyond the courses: associations and hackathons
The courses are only the skeleton of an EPFL exchange. What turns it into something worth more than the credits are the things around them, and both of the big ones reward the person who plans ahead.
EPFL and UNIL together have a huge number of student associations, and as an exchange student you can join any of them. I would recommend joining at least one, whether for CV-worthy extracurricular work or simply to learn something outside your courses. The practical catch is timing: recruitment is front-loaded. I was there from September, and almost all the associations ran their new-member intake that same September, each with its own deadlines, so it is easy to miss if you land and settle in first. Research the associations before you go and note their application windows. I joined the Investment Society, based at HEC Lausanne, which is part of UNIL, because I am into finance. It ran to about five hours a week, with a two-hour meeting every Monday and two team presentations across the semester, which gives you a sense of what committing to one actually costs in time. The range is enormous: finance, consulting, the EPFL AI team, which I would single out as worth a look, plus military, sports, ski groups, entrepreneurship, essentially everything. And the social payoff is real, because associations are one of the best ways to meet people outside the Erasmus bubble, actual bachelor's and master's students who live there. Almost everyone is in at least one, and you can join two or more if you have the time.
The other high-upside thing, and a very Swiss one, is hackathons. If you enjoy them, Switzerland has plenty, and they are seriously funded, with big companies sponsoring them and large prizes on the table. I won the Sui Foundation hackathon, run in collaboration with the Blockchain Student Association, which had somewhere around 20,000 CHF in prizes, and I competed at ETH in one organised by the ETH Entrepreneur Club, with roughly 70 participants and three prizes totalling about 20,000 CHF. LauzHack is another to look up. The one practical rule: register early and build your team in advance. There are a lot of applications, and if you leave it to the last minute you will fall behind before you start.
What I would do differently
If I could send advice back to myself before I left, it would be a short list.
Join the FMEL housing queue the very day your EPFL invitation arrives, and set a flexible, earlier move-in date rather than a strict 1 September one. Almost all the housing stress traces back to acting too late or insisting on the exact date everyone else is fighting for.
Chase every scholarship, and never accept a discouraging answer secondhand. The friends who skipped Santander because someone said Switzerland was not covered left real money on the table. Verify eligibility yourself.
Decide on the research project before you arrive, not after. Had I started looking a semester earlier instead of scrambling once I was there, I would have had my pick of projects rather than getting lucky with one.
And research the associations and their September deadlines before you go, so you do not miss the one intake window while you are still finding your feet.
A last word
Nothing in this guide is meant to make EPFL sound difficult, because it was not. It was one of the best stretches I have had: well funded if you do the work of applying, a beautiful and easy city to live in, world-class courses, and a research culture you can genuinely become part of. The friction is real but narrow, and it lives almost entirely in two places, securing housing and navigating the first weeks of enrollment, both of which you can now see coming.
If you are choosing where to spend an exchange and EPFL is on your list, the honest answer is that it is worth the effort, and most of that effort is just planning ahead. Do the boring parts early, the funding, the housing queue, the research project, the associations, and you free yourself to enjoy the rest. Go.