International Staff Week – ideas and integration

Given the importance of these topics, TU Delft’s Central International Office (CIO) hosts an annual event that brings together representatives from international offices around the world. Called the International Staff Week, it is a three day session with team projects, symposiums and discussions. Held for the second time this year, participating universities included Lund University, Sweden, Chalmers University Sweden andthe University of British Columbia, Canada. There were also representatives from France, Finland and Britain among others. “Elco van Noort, the head of the CIO, came up with the idea of the International Staff Week and we held the first one in 2014. At the time, he had been invited by some institutes to assess their internationalisation processes. That’s when he thought it would be a good idea to have such discussions on a broader platform,” said Judith Hofstra, Project Manager, Internationalisation, CIO.

This edition of the event focused on how universities deal with three aspects – recruitment and admissions, mobility and partnerships, and services. While recruitment and admissions explored how different universities attract international students and researchers, discussions on mobility and partnerships looked at how universities choose their partners and the kind of exchange programmes students opt for. “For instance, British universities traditionally have fewer partner universities as they have very stringent criteria. On the other hand, TU Delft has a lot of partner universities and that gives our students a lot more exchange options. So it’s interesting to see what works in both situations,” added Hofstra. “We also talked about how to make exchange programmes more meaningful in the long run. Students opt for programmes that look impressive on their resume, and usually only want to go to reputed universities or countries like UK and USA. What if we could create programmes that are interesting, helpful to global societies and make an impact on prospective employers? That brings us to the question of how a university want to brand itself – as one that contributes to the world or just as a quality university?”

At the event, TU also conducted a talk on MOOCs, an area in which TU Delft is a front runner in Europe. For the main project, visitors were divided into groups and given a fake university (Denway University) and asked to come with action plans in each of the three categories. Some interesting topics that came up under Admissions & Recruitment were to prioritise Non-Europeans in terms of accommodation (‘otherwise they will go somewhere else’) and to build a network to create diversity and adverse over application. “Most universities face the same sort of questions and we can all learn from each other.”

It’s wasn’t all work though as the visitors also got a chance to unwind and explore Delft. A campus tour, a Vermeer walk and biking were among the things on the agenda.