“Now that I’m at uni, I fortunately have the freedom to schedule my activities the way I want to,” says Julia. It so happens that the 19-year-old is ‘better at studying late at night’. On weekdays she likes to go to bed at around 3.30am. She generally gets up about five hours later. “This works for me, so I’m like, right, that’s the way we’ll do it, then. I’m generally OK after one short night. I’m OK on Day 2 as well. Day 3 can be quite hard, but once I’ve gotten over that, I’ll generally be OK for the rest of the week. On weekends I spend less time revising, and I generally go to bed before midnight. And on Mondays I’ll be back to staying up until the wee hours.”
Julia often visited campus Woudestein even when she was still in secondary school. “My classmates and I used to come to the campus to do our school work here. We had found a map of the campus on the Internet. These days I have fewer contact hours and I’m expected to do more at home, but when it comes down to it, I’m spending as much time on the campus as I was last year. The buildings stay open until late, and when you’re hungry, you can quickly nip out and grab a bite. You can’t do that in a regular library.” She still sees nearly all of her former classmates on campus, even though only half of them are EUR students. “For instance, some of them attend the University of Amsterdam, but they come here to work on their assignments.”
Degree programme is much harder than expected
The amount of time it takes Julia to get to the campus has increased, because the Federowicz family moved from Rotterdam-Ommoord to Hoek van Holland last summer. “Due to the work being done on the railway between Hoek van Holland and Schiedam, I must now take a bus to Schiedam, then catch a metro. Sometimes the journey time will be 45 minutes, and sometimes it will be an hour and a half. It depends on how fast the bus driver drives.”
And what about the law degree Julia used to dream of? She spends at least forty hours per week doing her course work. She attends lectures, works out decrees and tries to determine how the decrees are related to the learning objectives stated for the course. “Getting my degree is a lot harder than I thought it would be. It is so much work. And once I’ve finally wrapped my head around all the subject matter, the exam questions are so incredibly precise. You’re expected to apply all the subject matter discussed in all the lessons in one single question, right in your very first exam. It makes me think: what the hell, what is this? But I’m definitely going to complete my degree, because this is what I want to do.”
