Living in Timisoara
Timisoara is in the top 3 cities in Romania, as size and economics prosperity. It has around 320.000 inhabitants. It is called also the City of Flowers and of Parks, crossed by our beautiful river Bega. The city centre is the heart of the city with a plethora of restaurants clubs, bars and pubs, and UPT is right in the city centre. It is the only city in Romania with five public means of transportation: bikes to rent for free, trams, buses, trolley buses and boats. You can see the boats right from the Politehnica University windows as the Bega River flows in front of the university. Thus, if you want to enjoy a coffee by the water shores of Bega River – just walk out of the university and there it is!
The population speak English, some German, Hungarian and French, other Italian and Spanish, it is known for its openness to diversity and multiculturality. A coffee is around 10 lei (2 Euro), one bread 1 euro and a beer around 15 lei (3 Euro).
Interesting engineering premiers about Timisoara, the city home of UPT:
- 1884 – it is the first European city electrically lighted
- 1866 – the first ambulance service in Romania
- 1899 – it is the first Romanian city with electrical trams
- 1908 – the first cinema in Romania
- 1920 – the first city in Romania to have first a technical university not a general comprehensive one
- 2021 - 2023 – UPT as a main contributor to Timisoara – European Capital of Culture
- 2023 – UPT as the only engineering university to host in the campus an art gallery, proposing exhibitions combining arts and engineering
- 2022 – present - UPT organizes and hosts in Timisoara the most important tech conference presented by a university in Romania. Notable speakers on AI were Garry Kasparov, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, and in 2025 TechTalks by UPT will host Michiu Kako, Physicist, Futurist and Author, Richard Quest, CNN, Jason Lynch and many others, on Quantum Computing
- 2025 – according to Nomads.com, Timisoara is on the 10th place world-wide in a top for remote workers living around the world - Nomads.com - Best Places to Live for Digital Nomads . This might be in direct connection with the fact that in 2013 Timisoara became the city with the highest download speed in the world, based on NET INDEX report.
"Timisoara is cosy, quiet, it is a sense of order, at the same time it is a vivid place for students, the campus is right in the city centre, and everything is at 20 minutes’ walk."
Jihan, a student from Medellín, Colombia, enrolled in the Romanian Language Preparatory Year