First week of uni

Today began my second week at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, so I thought I would come and share some thoughts that have come up so far. Since I'm doing a minor in neuropsychology which is a completely foreign territory for myself and many other fellow students, I can't say anything general about how courses are normally organized in Dutch universities, but here we go:



Something really different compared to my studies in Finland, is the length of "school days". Here they actually feel like school days, 'cause I have some days with lectures from 9am until 4pm. The amount of lectures varies weekly, but I definitely have much more lectures in a week than I did back in Helsinki. That might also be because we have to go through the very basics of genes, brain, anatomy etc. and still finish the minor within 5 months, which requires a lot of teaching and learning. Contributing to the amount of lectures, we also have practical studying like laboratory sessions, which obviously aren't really needed in sociology :D



Two other things that caught my attention already during the first week were the communicative way of studying, and lack of hierarchy between the students and the lecturers. An example of the communicative side is that before having a lecture from keynote speaker, we were assigned to read their research paper, and we had a workshop where we discussed about the article and could present questions to the course lecturers, instead of us all just reading the articles by ourselves before the actual keynote lecture. Also every lecturer highlights the importance of asking if you don't understand something (and students actually do ask questions) and contacting them by e-mail or calling them if you have any problems with the course.

I feel like the lack of hierarchy is a part of the communication, because the way that students and lecturers talk with each other seems much more relaxed and less stiff than in Finland. It reminds me more of the communication between students and teachers in high school or primary school, where as in university the students and lecturer always seem to have much more distant relationship. It was also nice to notice here that after every lecture there are students walking up to the lecturers to talk or ask questions. We have been told that this lack of hierarchy also exists in Dutch work life, where the workers and bosses are equal and everybody has the right to express their opinion and ideas.

One thing that we have also been told about in advance, is the academic grading system here in Netherlands. Today at the info of our second course, our lecturer told us that "you have to get 5.5 in order to pass the course, but of course I hope you all get 7". Knowing that the highest possible grade is 10, (and the lowest being 1), this sounds really weird. In Dutch academic grading the grades 9 and 10 are really rare (together they form about 3% of all results), and 8 is already considered as "excellent". So I guess passing the test normally means that you get something between 5.5 and 7. And if you fail, you get to find out just how badly, on a scale from 1 to 5.5, yey! It doesn't make much sense to me but I'm curious to see just how difficult it is all going to be :D

Now after spending some studying time to write on my blog, maybe I should actually start studying.