Admission

The Departmental Admissions Board of Industrial Design (ID) determines an applicant’s admission to the ID (pre-)master program. The admissions committee evaluates your prior education, professional experiences, as well as knowledge and skills gained in auxiliary activities such as personal projects or extracurricular courses. Therefore, we will ask you to submit additional information about your previous education. 

When you apply for our pre-master program, we will ask you to upload the following documents:

1. Portfolio
2. An official, verified transcript of records
3. Description of your graduation project
4. Overview of your competences by expertise areas
5. Description of your courses

Before preparing the documentation, please familiarize yourself with the admission procedure and our evaluation approach, as described below.

Please provide all documentation in English. TU/e’s official language is English, and we cannot guarantee that other languages can be interpreted by the committee, resulting in the rejection of application.

Detailed information about the admission procedure can be found on the Pre-master programs page. In case you are interested in applying for a pre-master you can start at the Admission and Enrollment page.

To successfully participate in a TU/e pre-program, you need to have a sound knowledge of the English language. Therefore, you need to provide proof that you have (at least) a pre-university (VWO) level in English by means of:

• A VWO degree, or
• You have obtained the Staatsexamen VWO Engels, or
• If you fall into one of these categories, or
• A certificate confirming these English language proficiency requirements.

Please note that an HBO Bachelor's program taught entirely in English, does not exempt you from providing proof of English proficiency.

We want to highlight that we cannot accept any other exemptions than listed on the website and we cannot accept certificates older than 2 years. For further information and an overview of exemptions see the Language proficiency requirements. If you have any questions about the English proficiency requirements, please contact premaster.admission@remove-this.tue.nl.

To evaluate your application, the committee focuses on competences in five areas of expertise, commonly developed in other academic disciplines:

1. Competences in Creativity and Aesthetics such as imagination, creativity, visual and aesthetical presentation, and argumentation, commonly developed in the Arts and Humanities.
2. Competences in Technology and Realization such as mechatronic, computer-aided design, or material engineering, commonly developed in Engineering Disciplines such as electrical or mechanical engineering.
3. Competences in User and Society such as qualitative and quantitative study design and interpretation, working with theoretical frameworks, and answering societal questions, commonly developed in the Social Sciences.
4. Competences in Business and Entrepreneurship such as planning business development, devising marketing strategies, or showing operational skills, commonly developed in Economics and Management studies. 
5. Competences in Math, Data, and Computing, such as programming, data science, or knowledge about natural laws, commonly developed in Formal Sciences such as Physics and Computer Science.

The committee is looking for a balanced development in all five, but at least three expertise areas.

We ask for a portfolio demonstrating your competences in the five expertise areas—the portfolio is also required for applicants without a design background. The portfolio is used for gauging your qualities, skills, and thought processes, as a designer. We value the conceptual and aesthetical quality of your portfolio and are looking for work on physical and digital contributions, e.g., sketching and prototyping, but also scripting, programming, and work with microelectronics.

For technical projects without a visual component such as scientific investigations, software development, or essay-based projects, please provide a brief (max. 200 words) description of the project.

For each project indicate if the work was performed individually or as part of a team. For team projects, please indicate your unique contribution to the project.

Formal requirements:

• We expect the portfolio to be delivered as a PDF or PowerPoint presentation. The size of the portfolio should not succeed 5Mb. 
• Please aim for one, a maximum of two pages, per project and stay within a 15-page limit for your portfolio. Only in exceptional cases, we are willing to investigate portfolios that substantially succeed our page limit.
• Our primary interest is in the quality of your projects. However, we expect attention to the presentation of the portfolio either by showing graphic design skills or by paying close attention to a clean and visually accessible presentation.

Please provide an official and verified transcript of records from your school. Assure that the transcript of records is translated to English. The transcription needs to be verified by the school or a verified translator.

Please describe your graduation project on a maximum of two pages. Please highlight which competences you applied during your final project.

To assure that the submission is accessible to us, and to provide you with the opportunity to accurately show your skills, we ask you to provide an overview of evidence for your competence development in at least three of the five different expertise areas. For example, you could demonstrate your competences in User and Society by listing courses on experimental design, on theories of sociology, and by referring to a user study where you evaluated a design artefact, or present findings from a literature review.

For the self-assessment, please create a table like the one displayed below, and list where you see evidence for the different expertise areas. Should a course or project speak to more than one expertise area, feel free to assign the same course or project to two different columns. We are not only looking for knowledge learned in any particular courses, but the application of your knowledge in design practice. If you assign a project to an expertise area, please make sure the competence is evident in the portfolio, e.g., if you claim marketing expertise, the project in your portfolio should demonstrate marketing competences. 

Please provide us with a description of your courses. Please provide a brief course description, in a separate document, in case the name of the course is not self-explanatory, e.g., “Design Exploration”.