One of the things you definitely need to know as a student in Freiburg Uni is how the printing system works. It is quite different from Edinburgh’s system (also more complicated and less efficient, but that’s just my personal opinion) and knowing how it all works would have saved me quite a bit of time, thus I would like to share a few basic things with you.

Where can I find printers?

#The most obvious place is UB1 (the main library building), however it is definitely not the most convenient one since it’s relatively far away from the main campus. However, it seems like a new main uni library should be opened next academic year. If you are going to Freiburg next year, feel lucky because it will be right in front of KG I (one of the main university buildings in the central campus);
# UB2 which is not actually even a proper library (you can only pick up the books you already ordered there) has a few printers as well;
# There are some random printers in various university buildings, for instance, KG III has at least one printer on every floor.

P.S. There are some scanners as well. The scanners in the UB2 are free and quite easy to use (pretty much the same as the ones in uCreate lab in Edinburgh Uni’s Main Library), however you might have to pay for scanning in UB1 (most likely if you are scanning something big).

How do I pay for it?

Now that’s where it gets interesting.
#Some of the printers have a place where you can insert your Student Card and then you can print stuff and the money will be taken from you student card.
#Some of them don’t… which means that you have to put some money into a special separate printing account. And that actually is complicated enough that they had to make a guide how to do it (which is, I guess, very nice of them since otherwise it would be hard to figure it out out of nowhere). Anyway, German Version of the Guide https://wiki.uni-freiburg.de/campusmanagement/doku.php?id=hisinone:studieren:druckerkontenaufladung and the English one https://wiki.uni-freiburg.de/campusmanagement/doku.php?id=hisinone:studieren:druckerkontenaufladung_en .

How do I get money into my student card?
It’s quite uncomplicated, you can put cash into your card in these places https://www.unicard.uni-freiburg.de/FragenAntworten/aufladen. The money in your student card can also be used to pay in the Mensen and pay for the washing machines and dryers in student accommodations (it’s actually the only way to pay for it, so make sure you have some money in your student card if you want to have your laundry clean).

A few more notes on printing in the UB2

In order to print out stuff in UB2, you have to log into one of the computers, select print and then select one of the printers (there is one colored one, and two black and white ones, one of them is particularly good if you are printing a large amount of pages). Then you have to go to the room where printers are and (most likely) wait in a small queue to use one solitary computer from which you can actually start the printing process. You will have to log in using the same information you’d use to log into any other university computer, then it will show you your account balance and the documents you requested to be printed from the normal uni computer. Press ‘Drucken’ and try to guess which of the three printers is which (and which one you initially chose) in order to pick up the printed material… Luckily they are all in the same room.

Other problems you might encounter (at least I did)

# The printers in the KG III don’t seem to recognize Word documents from the memory-stick. I’m note sure if that problem has only occurred to me though…
# It doesn’t seem that Freiburg Uni has a cloud-printing system the way Edinburgh does, thus having a memory-stick with you is always a good idea.

I hope someone will find this helpful, perhaps I should write a few helpful tips about the library system as well 😛

P.S. I found it quite funny that the wordpress’ auto-corrector didn’t have the word ‘Freiburg’ in its dictionary and kept suggesting that I wanted to write ‘beefburger’ instead of ‘Freiburg’.