“You have to take your own responsibility,” says Floortje Wijnands, second-year research master's of Business Research from the Netherlands. “You can choose to do very little, but it is wiser to start studying immediately.” She actually had no idea what to expect when she started her bachelor's of International Business. She had been to the open day, had heard about PBL, but in her first group tutorial “everyone was nervous and nobody really dared to speak”. The fact that the language used was English also took some getting used to. “A bit strange, reading the literature in English also slows you down at first, but you get used to it.”
Wijnands liked being able to manage her own time and not having to be at school every day at eight-thirty. “Lessons for only two hours a day, that is really great.” During the first block, she became friends with Esmaralda Muije, now a master's student of International Business. It is very important to make friends, both of them say. “Make sure you integrate in university life. You can give each other support and you are doing something other than just studying. Some students focus too much on studying, they only think about getting good marks. They are the people crying in the library because they are afraid that they won't pass an exam.” Another final tip: find the right study method. One person may benefit from drawing up a list of questions, another may use summaries; Wijnands creates mind maps. “Not long pages of text, but a sketch that shows what is related to what.”
“You have a lot more freedom at university,” says Hannah Bettenhausen, master's student of Management of Learning. She went to secondary school in Germany and did her bachelor's in Frankfurt. “There are a lot of choices to make: what are my ambitions, what do I find interesting, which course would suit me? You have to take a closer look at yourself than you ever did before. You are confronted with your expectations and with reality. Sometimes, they overlap and sometimes they don't.” It is important to talk to a lot of people and ask for advice. “You need people who ask the right questions. Keep listening to others. Use your freedom to hear other ideas, step out of your comfort zone.”
“You need to motivate yourself and find out a lot on your own,” says Christopher Hagemann, master's student of International Business, from Germany. The time when your teacher broke everything down for you has gone. Moreover, the pressure of work is much greater than at secondary school. “You need to discover how to study, what is important and what is not. Lecturers at university won't tell you that.” Living in digs? “Washing and cleaning wasn't a problem. Cooking was the hardest, but I can handle that now.”
Anne de Groot, graduated from the bachelor's of Health Sciences, from the Netherlands, lived with her parents for the first six months. “Student life only really begins when you live in digs. You enter a completely different world. If you go home every day, you don't really get to know that world.”
According to Valentijn Verberk, third-year student of Economics, from the Netherlands, it makes a great difference whether you live in a room on your own or not. “At home, my dinner was waiting for me on the table and my washing was done. Suddenly you have to do all that stuff yourself. You quickly get used to it, you have to.” Where it concerns studying, the biggest difference between secondary school and university is taking responsibility. Verberk was well able for that, completing the propaedeutic programme in one year. “You have your first exam after eight weeks, you don't know how difficult it will be, how comprehensive. I prepared myself for it really well. After a couple of exams, you get better at dealing with them.”