Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU) and the Dutch Academic Culture
Now that classes have been in session for a month, I feel I can give an accurate review of the academic culture.
To start off, the set up of our semester loosely reflects the quarter system in the States. At VU (pronounced like the beginning of the word 'ew'), there are two "periods" that we are enrolled in for our program. Period 1 is from September to end of October, and Period 2 is from November to Mid December. We have one full week off to study for exams, which for most of us are our entire class grade.
...of course I had to take first day pictures for my mom...
Me on the Van der Madeweg platform waiting for the metro to Zuid (right) and me in my apartment after I got ready for the day (left)
During Period 1, I am taking World Religions (for the upper theology core) and Themes in Dutch History (a mandatory Dutch course, an elective). Dutch History is twice a week, and is 1 hour and 15 minutes long while World Religions is twice a week, and is 3 hours and 45 minutes long. Yea, 3 hours and 45 minutes long. Both are lectures, and are some days, challenging to pay attention to the professors talk for hours on end. Neither class has any real engagement with other students or the professor and our only homework is to read. Though this sounds nice, each class requires at least 100 pages of readings after every class. Additionally, the locations for each class differ every day, so we learn in different rooms every time we have class.
I apologize for this startling picture, but I do not have a lot of pictures of us in class.
Us in World Religions - that day was rough so we wanted to document it.
Thankfully I have my P1 classes with fellow Loyola friends so we make the most out of our classes.
VU is a very big university with about 25,000 undergraduates, but houses hundreds of nationalities and ethnicities, which is really, really cool (Amsterdam houses about 85% of all of Western Europe's diverse population). It is definitely way bigger than what I am used to at Loyola. It reinforces the reasons why I chose Loyola, one of them for class size. I enjoy smaller classes, getting to know my professors on an intimate and personal level. At VU we are just a number, though obviously, relationships with the professors can still be possible. The class sizes are much bigger, and because we are exchange students, we have a wide range of people in our classes. In my World Religions class, we have a lot of adults who are on a spiritual track at the university.
**Fun Fact: It turns out that in the Netherlands, students cannot pick their classes once they pick a major/track to study. We are lucky that we can pick which classes we want to take.
Another big factor that I did not even consider before we started classes, but surprisingly is a big part of our school days, is transportation. We live in Diemen Zuid, which is about 30 minutes away from our university. In order to get to school, we have to take two metros and transfer once. We wait for the Centraal Station metro at our home station, Diemen Zuid. Then we take the Centraal metro to Van der Madeweg and transfer onto the Isolatorweg metro to the Zuid station where we get off. Then we walk about 10 minutes to campus. Our way to school is a big part of our day when we have classes, especially when we have our 9am (World Religions) because we have to time everything. We always have to account for delays, too.
Here is the view at the Zuid station waiting for our metro to go home. Had to capture the sunset here.
Funnily (though not funny), I took these pictures seconds before we found out the Queen of England died.
We can bike to school, which some of us have tried earlier in the trip, but it is about an hour ride, and there are multiple steep hills. Yea we sound lazy, but realistically, biking to school is impractical for us (we are very aware this is a very American way of thinking).
More pictures of the way we have to go when we go to and from school, located in the business district.
All in all, it was tough to get used to the academics here in Amsterdam, and like at home, every professor has their own teaching style. We've all gotten used to it and feel like real locals at this point in our studies.
I made a TikTok day in my life on the day I had my two classes. I made this for fun but thought it would really sum up this blog post (I had to upload it to Youtube for it to load on Blogger, so the quality decreased).
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