Entries for October 2013

MAASTRICHT. A twenty-year-old foreign student from Maastricht had his head stuck in a railing for hours during the night from Wednesday to Thursday last week. It happened on the site of the Sappi paper mill on the Biesenweg in Maastricht. A security guard saw on the security camera how a guy was wrestling with the gate at approximately 5:30 hrs. Th...

In two of my newly started courses, I am the only non-Japanese student. Luckily the teachers stick to English, but despite this, I can’t help but feeling I’m the odd one out. When a question is asked and I have an opinion or an answer, I speak up (PBL has trained me for this). But, for Japanese students the strategy seems to be nodding ...

Twelve thousand kilometres and thirty hours later, I find myself in fifteen degrees Celsius at eight in the morning at the end of the world—literally. Flying over the breathtaking cordillera of the Andes was one of the most surreal moments in my life. It's winter here, though most days the pollution makes it hard to tell what time of the ...

In the Netherlands, especially during events like INKOM, it is common for associations and companies to load students with flyers. Sometimes you accept them out of interest, sometimes because they’re practically pressed into your hands, but after a week, maybe two, the flyers will be long forgotten. At the start of the new semester at Waseda...

MAASTRICHT. Isabel Mank, a German master student Global Health, has won the Catharina Pijls Aanmoedigingsprijs – 2000 euros – for her thesis on local water management in Sudan.  “One can imagine that this is not the easiest environment to gather data”, says her mentor Rik Crutzen, “but she managed to do this adequ...

MAASTRICHT. Old or broken bicycles that have been abandoned around the city or in the backyard of a student house – weesfietsen, in Dutch – are getting a new life thanks to Jules & You, a student services company in Maastricht. They initiated the project in cooperation with TransferWerkt, which helps jobseekers who are short on qual...

A lot of things seem really complicated in Japan. Eating with chopsticks, the traditions for sumo wrestling, the kimono’s… In most cases, either I can probably get used to the difficulties, or I will never have to. However, even after weeks of daily practice, I still have no idea how to adept to the Japanese sidewalk culture. Result: I...

MAASTRICHT. According to students, University College Maastricht is the best liberal arts programme in the Netherlands.  Moreover, figures and tables published last week in the Elsevier weekly magazine show that it is the best-scoring programme in Maastricht. Every autumn, Elsevier lists the best studies in the Netherlands, based on students&...