Students BSc Natural and Social Sciences going abroad
Vera Adinde
After spending a month taking a Spanish language course in Quito (Ecuador), Vera travelled to the southern city of Cuenca. She did her internship with the NGO Heifer, where she collaborated on a project called Future of Food. Its aim was to help and advise local farmers and communities on their food production. “At the beginning it was terrifying: I hardly spoke the language, I did not know the people and I had no knowledge of agriculture whatsoever as a city girl from Amsterdam. Nevertheless, in no time I found myself at village meetings, in schools, amid banana fields, in abandoned buildings with potential to serve as storage - you name it.”
Vera has been studying Natural and Social Sciences since 2020. After her first year, she chose the Artificial Intelligence major, plunging straight into mathematics and programming. But, as befits a true Natural and Social Sciences student, this did not mean she had lost interest in other fields. Therefore, she choose to explore more broadly and add something that was not part of the standard study plan. She wanted to go out into the wider world and learn about other people and cultures.
As part of his Bachelor's in Bèta-gamma, Coen went to South Africa for a semester at the University of Cape Town.
"As a Natural and Social Sciences student, you learn to be open to new and different perspectives from the very beginning of your student life. I think this contributed a lot to my exchange. By talking to many people, such as other exchange students and locals, I got to know the country and its people even better. As a result, I got to places I would never have gone to otherwise, heard many interesting stories, and learned a lot about the cultures and lifestyles. This was a super valuable addition."
The first-year students went to Berlin for a few days for the course ‘The State and the People: Introduction in the Social Sciences’. Besides several excursions that are linked to the themes covered in the lectures in the preceding weeks, the students did a photography assignment on different concepts of the course, in various districts of Berlin.