Pop the international bubble of the ISS students

To pop the bubble of ISS students, assistant professor, Georgina Gomez, has launched a collaboration with The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Against all expectations, the project was a huge success.

A disaster. Doomed to failure. Forget it. These are just a few of the reactions thrown at Georgina Gomez when she mentioned her plans to pop the bubble surrounding ISS students by entering into a collaboration with The Hague University of Applied Sciences. “The fact of the matter is that it’s been tried in the past and has never succeeded,” Gomez recounts. “Our students mainly socialise with one another and have no ties with The Hague as a city or other students there, never mind them being interested in Rotterdam and Erasmus. I wanted to change that by setting up a project that focused on the power of local connections.”

And so Gomez got in touch with The Hague University of Applied Sciences. She joined forces with Albert Kraaij, a lecturer at The Hague university, and together they came up with a project that focuses on local entrepreneurship. “Our students come from all four corners of the world and so they tend to think big. But I wanted to show them how important the local aspect is. After all, most of the interactions that you have as a person are local, and our students sometimes forget that.”

The approach caught on. Twenty students from the ISS and The Hague took on the challenge together. But it wasn’t only the international participants that learnt something from the project. “Vice versa, the HHS students also learnt a whole lot from our participants. They used to cycle past our building and wonder: what’s in there? Now they’ve came into contact with international students from completely different cultures for the first time. Which proved to be very valuable.”

ISS students Suthida Chawla from Thailand and Daniel Zea Vallejo from Ecuador participated in the first edition of the project. They, too, are very enthusiastic about the link with students from The Hague. “The ISS is very international, which is not only its greatest strength, but also a weakness,” Zea Vallejo explains. “You’re in a bubble there, and you have hardly any contact with Dutch people or Dutch culture. The lectures that we attended during the project were really the first contact that we had had. It was very worthwhile.”

Chawla agrees with her fellow student. “I had been studying in the Netherlands for six months already, but I had not had any contact with Dutch people. Not only did you get to know people, you also discovered how they would try to solve problems, for instance.” She highly recommends enrolling with the second edition of the project. “It pops the bubble you’re in, which is a good thing and great fun too.”