Background

MAASTRICHT. It is Tuesday, January 12, around one o'clock. Location: the entrance to the university library in the city center. The German Lennart Buggert, pre-master student of European Studies on Society, Science and Technology, is very focused at his phone. “I have my social media moment,” he laughs. "It’s not fixed in...

Towards the end of the interview, first-year student of Health Sciences Hadeel (pronounced “Adele”) Khawatmy casually reveals that she studies seven (!) days per week. “I get eight hours of sleep, I see my family when we eat, and I spend the rest of the time studying.” This includes evenings and weekends. She doesn’t ...

MAASTRICHT. No, she doesn’t make the exams herself and she doesn’t transport the piles of paper to the MECC either, but for everything else that has to do with exams in one of the large halls, you need to speak to Anja Ronken. She is the central exams co-ordinator at Maastricht University and obviously she does that so well that it earn...

When the lockdown was announced halfway through March 2020 because of COVID-19, it wasn’t just education that went online, from one day to the next, but also the exams. Tineke de Beaumont, functional manager of digital exams at Maastricht University, really had to pull out all the stops. She did that so well that she can now pick up one of th...

MAASTRICHT. Jaap van Dissel, director of the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and professor of internal medicine at Leiden University, will receive an honorary doctorate from Maastricht University during the Dies celebrations on Friday 29 January. The doctorate is being awarded because ...

Thursday 8 October 2020, the Court of Maastricht. Two public prosecutors – one of whom is Dave Mattheijs – are presenting their closing arguments, arguing why the accused Jos B. should be sent to prison for years. “A highlight”, reflects Mattheijs. “So much had been said about Nicky Verstappen’s case in the press...

Mark Vluggen, director of the bachelor’s programmes at the School of Business and Economics, has been in crisis mode for over a year. It all started in November 2019 with civil protests in Chile. Anxious SBE students on exchange asked if they could come back home. Not much later, similar requests arrived from Hong Kong, where protests had esc...

2020 was a turbulent year for many people, including Chahinda Ghossein, cardiologist in training at Maastricht University Medical Centre+. But, she says, “it was also successful. I ticked a few items off my bucket list.” Number one by a wide margin was publishing Queen of Hearts, a book on the power of vulnerability. In it, women open u...

No, 2020 was certainly not an easy year, admits Nick Bos, vice chair of the Executive Board. But – barely a minute into the interview – he also says that he doesn’t want this to be the story of a board member complaining about long working days and high work pressure. On the contrary. “I realise all too well that I&rsqu...

​Vera Schriebl (26), master’s student in the Medical Doctor-Clinical Researcher programme, was one of the medical students who signed up to help out at the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past year, she learnt a lot about being a doctor, but also about herself. Her 2020 in a nutshell: guilt, loneliness, work experience and grati...