Cover

“So, the challenge was to get a design for my cover that I wouldn’t feel ashamed of.” The final result shows the collective effort of at least three people. A former colleague, Evgeniy Ignatyev, who now works for a magazine, made the first draft depicting the five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. Fenko remade the last photograph herself and asked another friend, Erwin van Deutekom, to improve the quality of the pictures. Another friend, Cha Joong Kim, adjusted the final layout.

“The thesis is about how different senses contribute to the impression of a product,” Fenko explains of her PhD project. “Sometimes the senses work simultaneously, sometimes they compete, and one of the senses wins. It’s a difficult topic. It took me four years and still I cannot summarise the results in one sentence.”

After five years as an international student in Delft, it’s difficult not to appreciate the progress TU Delft has made in both welcoming international students and making their time here pleasant. Things are much easier and better organized than they were when I first arrived six year ago. Housing, insurance, study, visas… you name it. There’s been measurable progress on these important issues for international students. It’s still not ideal, but they are way better now. But there is one area where hardly any progress has been made: part-time working.

It’s still extremely difficult for non-EU international students to find part-time work. The inability to communicate in Dutch could be, and often is, the reason stated for not hiring international students. This is an inherent handicap a non-EU student has and the only thing one can do about it is learn the language. As it’s unreasonable to expect an MSc student to arrive speaking fluent Dutch, not being hired due to the language handicap hardly hurts. But it hurts when opportunities to work are lost due to the rules concerning the employment of non-EU international students.
Currently, the law states that international students are legally entitled to ten hours of work per week. But to work, students must possess a work permit that the potential employer must request. Typically it takes around four to five weeks for the work permit to be issued, and the employer must offer a contract for a minimum duration of one year. However, because of these rules, the odds end up being stacked against non-EU international students finding jobs.

At aerospace engineering, the twelve hours per week on offer as a teaching assistant for first and second-year BSc students leads to no non-EU students being hired, as this would violate the ten-hour rule. To the faculty’s credit, they do prominently mention their inability to request work-permits for non-EU students due to this rule. For jobs requiring less than ten-hours of work, which are typically found off-campus- the unjustifiable time it takes to issue a work permit, and the necessity of a one-year long contract, are disincentives to hire non-EU students. Getting hired is only the start. Changing employers is even more tedious and bureaucratic: to do so the student must request that their current employer nullifies their current work permit, so that the new employer can request a new one. This is because work-permits are issued to the employer, not the residence-permit holder, and consequently it takes about six weeks to change jobs – and part-time jobs for that matter! All this adds up to lost opportunities to work and bureaucratic nightmares for both students and employers.

It’s a travesty that the rules for non-EU students in the Netherlands are aligned in a manner that discourages people from hiring them. And this is in sharp contrast to our fellow EU countries: Germany issues every student a work-permit along with the residence-permit that sanctions 25 hours of work per week; 20 hours per week is the norm in Finland and the work-permit is issued to the student; and in Belgium it’s 20 hours per week.
Not only are the permitted working hours in other non-EU countries higher, but, more importantly, work permits are issued to the residence permit holders rather than employers – a crucial but important difference.

Work is important to all of us. It not only relieves the considerable financial burden on students, but also contributes to one’s education. For those of us who have managed to find work here, the work floor is an eye-opener to both this country and life outside university. As international students, we come with our own values and ethics, usually forged in our home countries, and it’s tremendously educative to see and experience a different attitude elsewhere. The work floor calls for adjustments from our side that definitely qualify as learning outside the university walls. If one believes in such an education, one must conclude that the rules governing the employment of non-EU students are having the perverse effect of shortchanging non-EU students of this aspect of their education.

The university administration must raise this issue in its discussions about the rules binding non-EU students. Reforming the rules will allow TU Delft, and the Netherlands, to lay claim to providing a complete education to it non-EU students, and, thereby, become a first-rate educational destination.