“Are you sure?” It was a question 25-year-old Marek Wittenberg from Dordrecht was asked more than once when he announced he would be quitting his job at DutchCulture, an organisation that stimulates international cultural exchanges, to embark on a Master’s degree. Many of his friends were delighted to finally leave the school rooms behind. “But I was actually really looking forward to it.”
It’s not the first degree he has attempted. As a fresh-faced secondary school graduate, he chose a higher professional education (HBO) degree in Law. “I once ended up talking to some friends who were talking about studying Law – they were unaware that I wanted to study Law at the time. They said, it’s always people who don’t know what they want to do, and I thought, ‘but that’s me!’” After a few months, he quit. “I had little in common with the rest of the group. I was just 16, the next youngest was 23. In the end, I thought we spent too much time talking about little problems, things I thought you could solve without involving a judge.”
Racing through
His next choice was Journalism at Tilburg. “My father, brother and sister are all journalists.” But the programme didn’t really match his interests. “I knew I wanted to focus on written journalism, but we also had to learn about television and radio. And there wasn’t enough of a focus on how to write a good article and too much about how to get people to click on your article.”
Third time’s the charm. After a gap year, he decided to do a HBO Bachelor’s in European Studies in The Hague. “My first year was during covid and that worked out well for me. I’m easily distracted, but there was nothing else for me to do then, so I raced through the course. I also enjoyed the content of the course, especially in the first two years, and the people were great. I was far from the oldest one there, a number of fellow students had already done a degree or had a job.”
Support for Ukraine
In third year, he took part in an exchange to Lithuania. “I wanted to go to a country I hadn’t been on holiday to.” It was fantastic. “I was constantly surprised, by the people, by the customs, by how cold it was – just before I left, it was -28 degrees Celsius, although it does sometimes feel colder in the Netherlands – and by how little sun they get.”
What made the greatest impression on him was the level of support for Ukraine, and how much Russia is hated. “It ended up being the topic of every conversation, even when it wasn’t initially. There was a huge banner on one of the buildings that said ‘Putin, The Hague is waiting for you’; it had been hung there by the government. The destination on every bus was listed as ‘Ukraine’ and you could only tell where the bus was actually going by looking at the number.”
Depth
Once he returned home, he finished his degree and found a job in Amsterdam, but the desire to learn never really left him. “My Bachelor was incredibly broad, so I started to wonder exactly what I could do now. I would have loved to do a Master’s that focuses on European culture, which I find an underexplored subject when it comes to the European Union, but there’s no such programme in the Netherlands. Instead I chose European Studies at Maastricht, which is focused more on political studies.”
It also meant moving from Rotterdam to a new city. “That was part of the appeal. I was a little bit done with the Randstad. I looked forward to a type of socialisation that I hadn’t needed there, because I already knew enough people. And I knew this would be one last chance to enjoy the spontaneity of student friendships. Yesterday, someone asked me if I fancied coming over in fifteen minutes to watch some football, you can’t do that if you’ve all got jobs.”
Protests
He’s also looking forward to working on his thesis. “During my Bachelor’s, I put it off as long as possible, but now I really want to get started. I want to talk about how the democratic right to protest has been hollowed out over the last few years in Germany. I was inspired by a pro-Palestinian protest I saw when I was in Berlin over the summer. There were about 250 protestors and 400 police officers. I found out that protesters are bound by all sorts of rules and looked into it further. There’s a whole list of things you aren’t allowed to do, such as drumming because that makes too much noise. Whereas the whole point of a protest is to draw attention.”