Applications Applications

Most of the Bachelor's degree courses at HAW Hamburg participate in the Hochschulstart dialogue-oriented service procedure (DoSV). You can currently apply for one HAW Hamburg degree course through Hochschulstart; you can apply for a maximum of twelve degree courses countrywide.

An application for multiple programmes that includes degree courses which are not part of the DoSV is not possible.

You can look at the degree courses page to find out whether you can apply for the winter or the summer semester of the particular degree course.

The following degree courses do not take part in the DoSV:

• Illustration
• Communication Design
• Fashion, Costume and Textile Product Design
• Information Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• all degree courses that are studied in dual form

For the Nursing and Public Management degree courses, which are offered exclusively as cooperative degree programmes, you apply for the training position and your place in the degree course directly through the organisation providing the training. You can find more information on the specific degree course pages.

Hochschulstart application process
Please start by registering for the DoSV at hochschulstart.de. Once you have registered successfully you will be assigned a BID (applicant ID) and a BAN (applicant authentification number). Both of these numbers will be required later when you submit your application via the myHAW application and student portal.

The application process consists of several phases. You can find detailed information about the DoSV and the coordination phases at hochschulstart.de.

View application status
You can check the status of your application and our university's admissions offers (from the end of January for the summer semester / from the end of July for the winter semester) in both your user account for the Hochschulstart application portal and the myHAW information and application portal.

Accept your offer of admission
As soon as a decision has been made you about your application, you will be notified via Hochschulstart and myHAW. If an offer of admission has been made through Hochschulstart, you need to actively accept the offer on Hochschulstart in order to receive an admissions offer from us. If we are unable to offer you a study place by the end of the process, you will receive a letter from Hochschulstart informing you that your application was unsuccessful.

Under the Hamburg Higher Education Act, you can also study without an Abitur or Fachhochschulreife certificate.

Individuals with the following qualifications have higher education entrance eligibility:

• Master tradespeople (Meister*innen) in accordance with the Crafts and Trades Code (Handwerksordnung)
• Certified business administrators (Fachwirt*innen)
• Individuals with equivalent advanced studies certificates in accordance with sections 53 and 54 of the Vocational Training Act.

Applicants who receive a grade of 2,0 or better on their aptitude test for a Design degree at HAW Hamburg and are at least 18 years old can also be admitted without a higher education entrance qualification.

If you do not belong to one of the above groups and therefore do not have a higher education entrance qualification, you can take an entrance exam pursuant to section 38 of the Hamburg Education Act in order to obtain this qualification.

Our HAW navigators are online self-testing tools about the individual degree courses.
They are meant to assist you in deciding on a degree course, and they are also an application requirement for almost all the HAW Hamburg degree courses. Because the tests are not graded, the results have no impact on your chances of being accepted.

To the HAW navigators

For most degree courses, whether or not you receive a place in the particular course is determined by the final grade you received for your higher education entrance qualification or by your wait time. The exact limit (numerus clausus) on the number of applicants that can be admitted is only ascertained once the ranking list has been generated based on the information (grades and wait times) from the current applications. This means that for each degree course, the numerus clausus only becomes clear at the end of each admissions process.

Note: The criteria 'achievement' and 'wait time' are evaluated separately, which means that a longer wait time does not improve the average grade.

Numerus clausus table (from the last admissions process; in German only)
Conversion from grades into points (in German only)
Admissions procedure (in German only)

Additional criteria

In some cases the average grade is only one of several criteria. In certain degree courses, the grades for particular subjects are weighted differently and some are not taken into account in the calculation of points.

The following Bachelor's degree courses have different selection criteria. These are outlined in detail in the admissions regulations:

Clothing Technology and Management, Admissions policy (in German only)
Mechanical Engineering and Production Admissions policy (in German only)
Media Systems, Admissions policy (in German only)
Media Technology, Admissions policy (in German only)
Rescue Engineering, Admissions policy (in German only)

An artistic aptitude test must be completed before an application can be submitted for the following degree courses:

• Illustration
• Communication Design
• Fashion, Costume and Textile Design