Between 2016 and 2020 I studied the Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunication Technologies and Services (Grado en Ingeniería de Tecnologías y Servicios de Telecomunicación) at the ETSIT — the School of Telecommunication Engineering of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). It is a 4-year, 240 ECTS degree (Plan 2010) accredited by ABET, and it qualifies graduates for the regulated profession of Technical Telecommunication Engineer — with a final-year itinerary that lets you specialise in Telecommunication Systems, Telematics, Electronic Systems, or Sound & Image. I graduated with an 8.1/10 average and 13 subjects with honors, having specialised in Electronic Systems.
Looking back, the degree was a slow but very deliberate build-up: four years of stacking layers — from pure mathematics to transistors to antenna theory to actual embedded systems — until the pieces finally clicked together in the final-year projects and the thesis. Here is roughly how it went.
📸 Scenes from the degree
Four years of Madrid: metro rides between campus and city, FPGA labs, snow-covered basketball courts — and the graduation day with my classmates Miguel Taibo and Carlos Arriaga. The ceremony itself came later than the degree: #UPMDay22, held at the Wanda Metropolitano (Atlético de Madrid) stadium in May 2022, where UPM finally handed diplomas to more than 15,000 graduates of the pandemic promotions (2019/20 and 2020/21) whose ceremonies had been cancelled.
🥇 First year: the mathematical toolbox
The first year is almost entirely foundations: Álgebra, Cálculo, Análisis Vectorial and Métodos Matemáticos, two semesters of Física General, plus Introducción al Análisis de Circuitos and Introducción a la Electrónica. What made it feel like engineering from day one was Programación — the degree starts with C, not Python — and Fundamentos de los Sistemas Telemáticos, which introduced networks and protocols before you even know what a modem is. By the end of year one you can solve circuits, write C, and explain how data crosses the internet.
🥈 Second year: signals, circuits and the physics of communication
Year two is where the degree gets its identity. Señales y Sistemas and Señales Aleatorias teach you to think in frequency and probability — concepts that would later be central to my thesis work on anomaly detection. Electromagnetismo and Campos y Ondas explain how signals physically propagate, Teoría de la Comunicación formalises how information survives noise, and Electrónica Digital plus Electrónica Analógica put real components in your hands. Redes y Servicios de Telecomunicación and Análisis y Diseño del Software round out the networking and programming side. This is also the year I first used tools like MATLAB for signal simulation — a taste of what computational engineering feels like.
🥉 Third year: the heart of the degree
The third year is where everything connects. Sistemas Digitales I & II introduce digital design and FPGAs — and Sistemas Digitales II is where I built my favourite course project, the Tricycle Tank, a Raspberry Pi laser-combat game with four parallel state machines, an Xbox controller bridge and a servoed laser turret. Meanwhile Tratamiento Digital de Señales, Teoría de la Información and Sistemas de Transmisión cover the signal-processing core; Redes de Ordenadores and Computación en Red go deep into protocols; Comunicaciones Ópticas, Radiación y Propagación and Circuitos Electrónicos round out the physical layer.
🎓 Fourth year: specialisation and the thesis
The final year is about choosing a path. Depending on the itinerary you take courses such as Microondas, Antenas, Comunicaciones Móviles and Radiocomunicaciones (Telecommunication Systems); Seguridad en Redes, Ingeniería Web and Centros de Datos (Telematics); Arquitectura de Procesadores and Sistemas Electrónicos de Control (Electronic Systems); or Televisión and Tratamiento Digital de Imágenes (Sound & Image). I chose the Electronic Systems itinerary — including Diseño de Sistemas Electrónicos Digitales, Arquitectura de Procesadores, Sistemas Electrónicos de Control, Instrumentación Electrónica and Sistemas para Conectividad — a natural home for someone who had fallen in love with digital design and embedded systems. And then comes the Trabajo Fin de Grado.
My own thesis, Anomaly Detection in Bus Headways — developed during my first year as a Data Science Researcher intern at Cabify in Madrid, supervised by Prof. Pedro J. Zufiria and in collaboration with Carlos García-Mauriño — used statistical signal analysis on thousands of Madrid EMT buses and later became an IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems paper. You can read the full story in my thesis post.
🚀 What it actually left me with
- An engineer’s mathematical intuition: differential equations, probability, and linear algebra stopped being abstract once they started predicting real systems.
- C, from the very first year: pointers, memory and state machines were drilled in early — which made embedded development and later systems work feel natural.
- Hardware humility: building and debugging real circuits, sensors and actuators teaches you that the world is noisy, and your code is not the only thing that can fail.
- Signals and statistics: the combination that would directly power my thesis — and, years later, my work on digital twins and robotics.
- How to learn anything: a telecommunication degree touches so many fields (physics, electronics, networks, signal processing, software) that you finish it knowing how to pick up a new technical domain quickly — the most useful skill of all.
ETSIT UPM · Bachelor’s Programme Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ABET Accredited BSc · UPM · 2016–2020 UPM Day 2022