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jaargang 43, 7 september 2000 English page

ISN Off to a Great New Start TU/eís international student association is in the process of a complete makeover. A new mentor scheme, a new name, a new local pub, more Dutch members and an international network are the ingredients. On Tuesday nights the members of ISN can be found in Paddy¹s Place. Foto: Bram Saeys ìThe International Student Network Eindhoven offers its members much more than the old IRCE (International Reception Committee Eindhoven) ever could,î says ISN treasurer and Physics student Mark Bax. ìIf only because we will be part of a European network of about 100 similar organisations. This network is also branching out into the rest of the world, for example to Australia.î Every year some 300 foreign guests come to TUE. People stay a few months, a few years or the rest of their lives. They are students, graduate students, two and four-year trainee research assistants, post-docs and researchers with local companies. ISN plans to welcome all of them with open arms. At the moment, many foreign ISN members are leaving, but there are also many new guests arriving. ìThe beginning of the academic year sometimes gets a bit hectic,î says ISN member (and former treasurer) Marit Fiege. ìStill, we hope to make everyone welcome and lend a helping hand.î Mentor For years the old association welcomed people arriving at the train station. Now ISN is taking things one step further. Members will be paired up as much as possible with new arrivals and asked to actively help guests settle in. Foreigners new to TUE or Eindhoven can request a ëmentorí using a form issued by BIA (Bureau for International Activities) in which they can express any specific needs or wishes. Dutch ISN members can volunteer their help using a similar form. Being a mentor means making preliminary contact by e-mail, inviting new foreign students or researchers to dinner and taking them to ISNís new watering hole ëPaddyís Placeí on Tuesday nights for drinks. ISN is asking all its members to help make foreign guests welcome in this way. ìActing as a mentor wonít cost much time and will quickly help you build an international circle of friends,î says an enthusiastic Mark Bax. Sponsor Irish pub ëPaddyís Placeí is now officially ISNís new local pub and sponsor. Architecture student Marit Fiege comments: ìDuring the intro weekís first year pub crawl we distributed free Paddyís Place/ISN T-shirts to anyone interested. We flew a big yellow ISN flag to make our presence even more obvious. There was a lot of interest in our plans. We had a fantastic week. A real new beginning.î Apart from the Tuesday drinks evening, Paddyís Place is also the venue of a (cheap) monthly group meal. Some of the old group will undoubtedly keep frequenting the traditional Thursday ëstudent nightí at CafÈ de Groot at Wilhelminaplein. ISN hopes to offer opportunities for Dutch and foreign students and researchers to get to know each other informally. This should lead to international contacts that will help people find trainee positions or jobs at foreign universities. Direct information from a foreign colleague can help prospective globetrotters make more informed choices. In general, ISN aims to furnish as much information as possible about working or studying at foreign universities. ISN will remain a good place for foreigners to meet colleagues in similar situations. ìIím enthusiastic about ISN because itís good to share the experience of being a foreigner. Also itís a help in discovering the Netherlands,î says Andrea Silva from Portugal. Excursions Anyone at ISN can propose and/or organise one of the networkís monthly excursions. Some of the destinations are toured every year, such as the ëDeltawerkení the gigantic dams in the province of Zeeland. There are trips to Amsterdam or mediaeval Belgian cities like Bruges or Gent. ISN is planning a camping trip this weekend to the old Roman city of Nijmegen, near the Dutch/German border. Currently, some fifty student are active in ISN, many of them close to graduate level. ISN members are from TU/e, Fontys Hogescholen and local companies who employ foreign trainees. ìAt ISN I met people from countries I canít even spell,î said Matt Beneken, who recently returned to the United States./.

New Web-site On-line Find the information you need in no more three clicks and a standard house style on most pages. These are the improvements to be expected from the TU/eís all new web-site on-line this Monday. The six-person editorial web staff worked like demons with web manager Marcel van Buijtenen to finish restyling and restructuring the TU/e web. The editorial web staff was formed in January of this year. ìWhat we found,î says Van Buijtenen, ìwas an unbelievable diversity in pages and an endless number of variations on the house style. We had to look for a way to unify the whole.î The solution was found in a webfilter that ësievesí existing web pages and transforms them to standard house style. International IPO Conference IPO, TU/eís institute for user-system interaction, has had close ties to Japanese research institute ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research) in Kyoto for five years now. This Monday a number of ATR staff will contribute to the first international conference in the field of user-system interaction, to be held in the Auditorium.One of the larger projects ATR is working on is the development of a translation machine. The conference starts Monday with a general lecture day. Hiroshi Tamura, retired professor in the field of human interfaces, will lecture on so-called ëlovable interfacesí. TU/e will contribute with lectures from IPO staff members prof.dr. Matthias Rauterberg (director), prof.dr. Emile Aarts en prof.dr. Don Bouwhuis. Less Compensation Tuition Fees Students from EU countries studying in the Netherlands will no longer be compensated for all tuition fees as of September 2001. In future, they will receive an amount equal to twelve times a basic Dutch scholarship for students in higher education living at home. This sum is now 144.25 guilders a month. The money saved, some 9 million guilders, will go to a new scholarship program. This scholarship program, also to commence in 2001, mainly targets students from Indonesia, China, Taiwan and South Africa.