/Voorpagina /Mensen /Nieuws /Opinie /Cultuur /Studentenleven /Achtergrond /English page /Onderzoek /Reportage /Bestuur /Ruis /Ranzigt /Colofon

/Faculteits Berichten /Vacatures /Mensa /Oude cursors /pdf formaat /TUE /Zoeken:

Jaargang 44, 20 september 2001 English page

"Why all these covered bridges?" Introduction tour of campus The start of the academic year is a hectic time at BIA, TU/e's Bureau for International Activities. Hundreds of new foreign staff and students need to be housed and shown the way around campus. This year, there were about one hundred more new arrivals than last year. BIA staff Tanya den Haan and Lutgart van Kollenburg have been organising two introduction programs a week since August, and expect to continue well into November at this pace. The group is relatively large on Thursday September 6, with nine Ph.D., exchange and Master's students from France, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Spain, Austria and South Africa. Lutgart van Kollenburg likes to start her groups off with coffee and introductions all round, before embarking on her power point presentation of the high points of life in the Netherlands. The lowest point of the Netherlands? Near Rotterdam, and 6.4 metres below sea level. The Deltawerken and the new man-made province of Flevoland are topics of interest. Some less serious items are how you can legally buy marijuana in so-called 'koffieshops' and the disgusting things you can also legally do to a raw herring. "We are very tolerant," Lutgart, who is originally from Belgium, informs her listeners. She goes on to discuss Eindhoven ­ 200,000 citizens and 20,000 students. Landmarks are pointed out on the map. The renowned Van Abbe modern art museum ­ closed for renovation and construction until the end of 2002. The spaceship-like Evoluon ­ formerly a Philips museum, now closed to the public. The PSV stadium - open, but tickets for regular national competition games are extremely hard to come by. Koffieshops are not shown on the map. At the end of the day, Eindhoven's main advantage seems to be its proximity to other interesting places in Europe and of course its excellent university. One guilder We embark on a hike around campus. We find out that the campus grounds were originally bought from Philips for exactly one guilder. First stop is the Sports Centre, with its flash new swimming pool, gymnasia, dojo, squash courts and surrounding playing fields. Cobus Potgieter, a Jan Tinbergen exchange student from South Africa, surveys with satisfaction how squash players work up a sweat. "This is very encouraging. We aren't Olympic players either," he observes. Vladimir Stojanovic, a Ph.D. student from Belgrade, says he plans to check out the possibilities for soccer and swimming. Walking the perimeter of the playing fields, it starts to drizzle. Marlene Gesierich, an Erasmus exchange student from Innsbruck, tells me how she thought the closed pedestrian bridges between buildings were strange when she arrived a few weeks ago during a heat wave. "But after only a few weeks in the Netherlands I understand why they're necessary." Tanya de Haan goes on to talk about how the campus is actually very swampy and how the buildings here need special foundations. Spanish Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student Antia Alonso Crespo, has already spent time at TU/e but is still interested in the lay-out of the campus. "I've found information on this tour I haven't found elsewhere, for example about the computers in the library and the language lab. It's good to know where to find things." Antia is of the opinion that more information about transport should be included in the introduction program. "This is my second time in the Netherlands, so I've already got a bike. But new people might like to know where they can buy one cheaply. Or how trains and buses work." Empty Her colleague at Electrical Engineering, French Erasmus exchange student Hugues Body has been at TU/e for a few weeks and is surprised at the empty Electrical Engineering building E-Hoog. "Of course I like having all that space and two computers, but the place seems to be a bit depopulated. It makes for a rather strange atmosphere." At lunch, courtesy of BIA, the food is puzzling for some. Why is there rice in the spring role? And people are drinking milk with their meals. These things are strange for the French and Chinese. The two South Africans puzzle over the difference between kroket and frikandel, which turn out to be something different in Afrikaans than in Dutch. "We speak Afrikaans and English, so we can understand Dutch if you speak slowly. If you don't want us to understand just talk really fast," says Barend van Dyk./.

Muslim students hurting Real Muslims would never commit terrorist attacks such as those in America, a Dutch imam declared on television this week. Still, Muslims everywhere have been put in a bad light since the day of the catastrophe last Tuesday. In the Netherlands, Muslims were threatened and mosques were vandalised. TU/e students (and Muslims) Youssef Boulaksil and Zineb Seghrouchni try not to let the feelings of hate toward Muslims disturb them, "but it still hurts". Youssef Boulaksil and Zineb Seghrouchni heard the news of the attack very soon after they happened at a party organised by multicultural student assocation Mosaic, of all places. "I heard on the radio that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. But I didn't realise at the time that these were terrorist attacks," Architecture student Seghrouchni recalls. From that moment on, the two students followed the news on the attacks closely, especially when Saudi terrorist Osama Bin Laden was marked the chief suspect. Muslims in America, and later in the Netherlands as well, started finding themselves on the receiving end of anti-Muslim sentiments. The TU/e students emphasise that negative publicity concerning Muslims is not new. "These attacks just make an existing situation worse," says Youssef Boulaksil, a second year Industrial Engineering and Management Science student. Having said that, the two students are still deeply hurt that many people now see a direct relationship between Islam and terrorism because of the alleged involvement of Bin Laden in the recent attacks. "Islam is a religion that advocates peace and solidarity. The perpetrators of these attacks may be Muslim ­or Jews or Christians or whoever-, but if they are, they have totally ignored the laws of Islam," Boulaksil continues. Connection However, Zineb Seghrouchni thinks the perceived connection between terrorism and Muslims is understandable in a way. "People need a frame of reference. With most terrorist attacks, such as those by the IRA in Northern Ireland or by the Basque terrorist organisation ETA in Spain, people have no clear idea who exactly to blame. Bin Laden is shown on television, we know what he looks like. And the connection is quickly made, whether or not it is justified. Speculations in the media only strengthen that." According to Boulaksil, President Bush's first speech on television also played a part in turning Muslims into the 'bad guy'. "He didn't come right out and say it, but between the lines he declared war on Islam. If I had been a non-Muslim in New York, I would have mistrusted any Muslim I saw on the streets. Only in his second speech did Bush say that America should respect Muslims and the Arab community," says Boulaksil. "But by then the damage had been done," concludes Seghrouchni./.

'Supervision Ph.D. students must improve' The supervision of research trainees at TU/e could do with some drastic improvement. Improved supervision could shorten Ph.D. research time, without affecting quality. These are the main points in a letter from AiO Overleg Eindhoven (an organisation that protects the interests of Ph.D. students) to the Executive Board, deans and research schools of TU/e. The pressure to finish in four years increased greatly last year. Ph.D. students who did not complete their dissertations within four years could previously make use of a kind of redundancy pay to get through the extra time they needed. A number of Ph.D. students found themselves in financial trouble last year, when an active job search requirement was instated as a condition for this redundancy pay. Foreign Ph.D. students encountered added problems with their work permits. AiOOE says Ph.D. students need a second supervisor to keep an eye on the whole research process and its supervision. Professors and Ph.D. students need to agree on the content of supervision and the consequences if a dissertation takes longer than four years. The organisation also recommends an annual evaluation interview between Ph.D. students, supervisors and secondary supervisors. In the case of any fundamental disagreement, Ph.D. students should be able to call in a departmental mediator. Chairman Brinkman asks the Executive Board to take AiOOE's suggestions into consideration. The English Page is written by Paula van de Riet. She can be reached at engcur@stud.tue.nl.