IamStudent: city trips and more for Chinese students
Eighteen months ago, Avi Goldstein, a Tourism Management (TM) student at Inholland Diemen, and two fellow students (Jason Zureineh and Kieran Litoux) came up with the idea for IamStudent: a five-day city trip intended to immerse prospective Inholland students in Dutch culture. IamStudent made it to the finals of the 2017 Wij Inholland Student Project award. And so it happened that, during the university of applied science's opening ceremony last year, Pieter Pot (cluster manager for Agri, Food & Life Sciences Delft) first learned about this project and immediately approached the TM students about the 2018 introductory week for Chinese students.
“IamStudent offers international students an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the Netherlands and with Dutch language and culture. Each year, more than twenty Chinese students from the Shanghai Normal University and Hebei Agricultural University come to Inholland Delft to complete the Double Degree programme in Horticulture & Agribusiness (DD). These students attend the first two years of the programme at their home universities in China, and then the last two years in the Netherlands. DD students begin here in the third year of their programme. A proper introduction to Dutch standards of conduct, language and culture is essential. They attend classes and immediately begin participating in the projects. These students also visit many Dutch and international horticultural businesses on location. It's important they are well-prepared, both for starting their studies and for their stay in the Netherlands,” according to Pieter. “The fact that we have been able to organise this with Avi, a student entrepreneur from our very own university of applied sciences, is simply fantastic!”
City trips and more
Avi, Kim and Rianne — all Tourism Management students — will be accompanying the DD students. They have prepared an interesting introductory programme for the Chinese students, including three city trips. Activities on the docket include a survival quest in Delft, a political tour of The Hague and a canal boat tour in Amsterdam. Israeli-born Avi is extremely pleased and proud that he was asked to help guide the DD students. He says: “A new country, a foreign language and culture, a different method of teaching... While studying abroad may be fun and exciting, it requires a good deal of adaptability, too.”
IamStudent
The story behind IamStudent began with Avi's own experiences. He arrived in the Netherlands three years ago because he was thinking about immigrating to this country. “During the trip, I wanted to experience the culture, the language and the universities, but above all the general ‘vibe’. That was an effective kind of preparation, because I then knew what to expect. The thing is — I could have made even better use of that time if I had been able to take part in a properly supervised and efficiently organised programme as well,” Avi explains.
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