Conference

Hi everyone,

I’m writing this message as I’m on my way back to the Netherlands and enjoying the scenery flashing by my window in the Thalys. The last couple of days Maaike and I have been attending the EAIE (European Association for International Education) conference in Nantes, France.

On the conference there were 3.600 people from 83 countries from all over the world. An impressive number of people who all try to make their university become more and more international. The opening session of the conference hosted a guest speaker, Leymah Gbowee from Liberia who wrote the book “Pray the devil back to hell”. She is a feminist who stood up in Liberia and gathered a large group of women to ‘fight’ for peace in Africa. The speech was very impressive and confrontating and I would recommend everyone to read her book or see her movie.

On Wednesday I attended a workshop on social networking, this was supposed to help us implementing tools such as Facebook, Twitter,Blogging and LinkedIn to get you guys more involved in the activities from the exchange office and keeping you up to date with all our activities. This of course resulted in this blog :). The workshop was very interesting and was presented by very experienced people from Cambridge university (UK), Northeastern University (USA) and Talinn University (Estonia). During the workshop they showed us some very funny and interesting video’s on social networking. Check the following link to see one of those video´s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2o2L5DUIuw.
Especially the following movie was very funny since this is just a simple video on a guy dancing around the world that got very famous despite its simplicity and you might have already seen it, since it has already been viewed 31.319.287 times by people from around the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY.

On Thursday and Friday I had meetings all day with coordinators or heads of the international offices of many of my partner universities. I ran around the conference all day to be on time for the meetings. It was great to meet all the people that I’ve been corresponding with the last couple of month and to see the faces that correspond with the e-mails. I’ve met partners from: Mannheim University (Germany); our new partner Ozygin University (Turkey); ESAN (Peru); Rouen Business School (France); University of Economics Prague (Czech Republic); Universidad del Pacifico (Peru); University of Bern (Switzerland); Vilnius University (Lithuania); Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); METU (Turkey); Koc University (Turkey); Bilkent University (Turkey); Bocconi University (Italy); Corvinus University (Hungary); Universidad del Rosario (Colombia) and last but not least PUC Rio de Janeiro (Brasil).

To summarize: it has been a great, interesting and inspiring week and in opposite to what I’ve learned during the workshop on Wednesday I did not network online, but in real life with many people from all over the world.

Since I’ve been jealous of many of you who went/are on exchange to the most exotic, exciting and wonderful places or enjoyed your holiday during the summer I will now make you jealous by saying that I will be enjoying my holiday for the coming three weeks in Indonesia :). If you have an urgent question that you would normally address to me you can now contact Elena or Maaike at TISEM-exchange@uvt.nl.

See you in a couple of weeks!
Linda

A week ago the new Academic Year started. After a long quiet summer on campus all of a sudden on Monday morning the campus was vibrant again and full of enthusiastic people ready for their new year.

The new international students arrived a week earlier. For the coming academic year we have about 800 new students that will be studying at Tilburg University. During the arrival days about 500 international students arrived to campus, of which approximately 250 exchange students. Of this number about 105 students are studying at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. Many nationalities from all over the world will be represented at Tilburg University, we have students coming from all over the world, such as South Korea, Australia, USA, Argentina, Greece, Turkey, Hong Kong and so on. This is what makes Tilburg an international campus with international classrooms where people from all nationalities and Dutch students enjoy the same lectures.

During our introductory Welcome Week the exchange students had their own programme. The academic part of the programme served to get to know their way around campus and know how everything at Tilburg university works, such as the exam registration, lectures, grading system, course registration et cetera. The social part of the programme was of course to meet all fellow exchange students, get to know their way around Tilburg, getting to know ESN and all other student organizations and most of all, having fun.

Last week the official lectures started and the international students had to get used to the Dutch way of living, meet a lot of new people and get used to the Tilburg way of teaching. Now everyone has settled in (hopefully!) and all students have chosen their final list of courses they will be taking during their semester at Tilburg University.

Having all these international exchange students at Tilburg University is also the perfect opportunity for Dutch students who are interested in studying at one of our partner universities to meet people from the country they are interested in, and ask those questions they can’t ask anyone else!

See you all,

Maaike, Elena and Linda