Maastricht applicants for 2013?

I was just wondering if there was anyone who is going to be studying at Maastricht University beginning in Sep 2013? I was hoping to chat to others in a similar situation as myself.I'm from the UK and have applied for European Law and have a conditional offer which has yet to be confirmed. Has anyone else applied for this course? :smile:

Reply 1

Zamindar

I just finished my studies in the Netherlands. Here are some advice if you are going there from the English-speaking Anglo-American world. Beware, studying in Europe is very different from studying in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, etc.

In Europe and particularly in the Netherlands. education (lessons) and assessment (feedback) is only offered in small groups and everywhere outside the UK-US (and particularly in Europe) education is socially managed through formation of peer-groups and then empowering those peer groups to teach each other and assess each others' work so that both time and money of the universities and professors are saved for other lucrative purposes. This is precisely why "Khan Academy", a Youtube based education provider has become more popular over the years in delivering academic contents online in a meaningful way than so-called universities that have become large impersonal corporations doing everything other than teaching students effectively; perhaps giving proxies to third parties online effectively!!

The problem with all Dutch universities is that they admit Dutch students who are not as good in English as the American, British, Canadian and Australian students, whose native language is English. As a result, when forced to work in small groups, the American student has to teach the Dutch student English who wants to proxy his race for his lack of skills and competence in English language and often tells the American student that English is only one of the five major European languages and therefore we (the Dutch) can only get by with minimum functional English at our universities. The problem is that these Dutch students don't understand that a tourist and a student cannot equally get away with the same standard of English. What could be true for a tourist with minimum English is not true for a student who need to know the language since birth or from earlier in life for non-native speakers in English. This is the deceptive caveat of the international education business of European universities that lack very far behind even the worst and the most under-rated American university. Europeans still want to play the accordion with their education when everyone in the world, including the Chinese, are playing the piano.

The worst part is that the Dutch universities overlook the poor English skills of their students, sending some of them for ESL classes while taking Masters level courses at the university. The expansion of Europe to Eastern European countries have further worsened the problem as those East Europeans are also not good in English but they have very high ambitions but cannot go to the United States, Canada, Australia and the Anglo-sphere for their deficit of English. "Birds of a feather, flock together". The Dutch and the Chinese are therefore flocking together in Dutch universities because of their respective deficit of English.