Studying in Switzerland

Hallo,
I am learning German because the United States does not provide affordable, quality education for any but the wealthiest of its citizens. I am a high school student and due to recent financial developments, most the college money we had saved up went bye-bye. So I originally figured I would end up losing the first ten years of my adult life due to student loans... Until I found out that many European countries provide college education to their citizens free (or almost free) of charge. And in the case of Switzerland, also to foreign students. One of the Swiss federal schools, ETH Zurich, happens to be in the top 25 best colleges in the world, and has a very highly esteemed architectural program. The catch is, the teaching language is German. (Standard Swiss German, which is Standard German German without the esszett, so i swear if another of my aunt's German friends tells me I'm learning the wrong language I'm going to cut someone) Therefore, I have slightly under two years to be able to pass a college entrance exam in German :!: :shock: :!: Tehehe, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to read a dictionary to absorb that much vocabulary. So there we go, and now I'm learning German. Also I guess somewhere along the way I'm going to have to pick up some Züritüütsch.
Also, on an unrelated note, I don't know why the hell the German language has to have three genders and the words being almost completely randomly put in one of them and why that retardedness has to effect half the words in the sentence. It doesn't matter how many times I listen to those audio lessons I can not remember the gender and I'll be screwing that up for the rest of my German speaking life!
Grrrrrrrr,
Dylan