Category: Student stories

According to the UvA website, the university provides a total of 3.941 study spaces across all locations, which feels like a lot. However, considering that the UvA is the biggest university in the Netherlands, with over 41.000 students this year, 3.941 is nothing. To put it in perspective, less than 10% of UvA students have a place to study at the university. These numbers are shocking. Studying at school is for many students motivating, as it puts you into 'workmode'. For other students, it is a necessity.

I always knew I wanted to study abroad, but before starting university, I had so many doubts and questions about leaving my home country and moving to Amsterdam. Would I feel welcomed in a new place? Would the language barrier be a problem? How was I going to make friends? Now that I have been studying at the University of Amsterdam for a whole semester, I want to reflect on these past four months as an international student and share my thoughts on feeling welcomed at UvA.

If you haven’t seen your literarily-inclined friend in a while don't worry: there’s a good chance that they’ve joined one of the seemingly hundreds of student newspapers, magazines, and journals that seem to pop up around campus every time a stressed-out humanities major has more then two consecutive hours of free time on their hands. As a writer turned editor for Youvatoday, I should know.

walk through Roetersiland, a destination in my mind, fire in my eyes, The Smiths on repeat. “Nothing can stop me now,” I think. No, truly nothing could stop me. Yet, one cannot help but notice the never-ending wave of heads after shoulders after bodies… bodies… bodies. Oh, so many bodies, yet somehow, they are one. A giant mob of monotonousness. It is quite a cultural shock to walk through a campus so vastly divergent from one’s own.