This Tuesday, December 17th, there will be a party for all foreign students and staff members of TU Delft. The party will be held at the Blauwe Knoop, which is in the basement of the TU’s main building.
Dutch universities have too few foreign and Dutch ethnic minority researchers, students and staff, and the numbers occupying high positions and permanent jobs is even worse.
Liters of leaked hydrochloric acid caused a big stir on the TUD campus last Friday. At least a hundred people were evacuated, the Kluyverweg was partly closed for several hours and a maintenance man suffered minor burns to his face.
For many foreigners at TU Delft, the Dutch pension system isn’t very transparent or beneficial.In Holland, all civil servants belong to the private ABP (civil service) pension fund, and each month employers and employees pay significant sums of money into this fund.
Costly permitsLast week, the Immigration and Naturalization Office (IND) decided to raise the price of residence permits to 430 euros. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) seems to be aware that this steep price rise means that Holland is becoming a less attractive place for skilled and highly educated foreigners to live and work.
TU Delft works hard to attract highly educated foreigners, but new Dutch immigration laws make being a foreign TU student or staff member a real pain in the backside and the wallet.
Get out graduatesStudents who have graduated must move out of their student apartments when they have finished their studies, says Minister Kamp, of the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.
Sports center gets half a millionThe Executive Board made a one-time-only 500,000 euro offer to the TU Delft Sports center. The money is to be used for optimizing the existing sports facilities.
An increasingly vocal group of academics say the Dutch professorial system needs to be reformed. The academic career path from post-doc, assitant/associate professor, to a full professorship is too unclear, demoralizing, and, in some areas, fundamentally unfair.
‘To improve the world, start with your own country’ is one of the propositions in Marjan Popov’s PhD thesis ‘Switching three-phase distribution transformers with a vacuum circuit breaker, Analysis of Overvoltages and the Protection of Equipment’, which he defended this week.
