BK Report
THE DUTCH FACTOR Words Federico Ruiz
For many international students, there is a moment in their first months at BK when they are surprised by how the skills, motivation, and sense of responsibility of many of their Dutch colleagues is not as high as theirs. After a while, they learn that, academically, their Dutch peers are a crucial and unpredictable factor that has the power to define the outcome of any group assignment, for better or worse. But, why is this “Dutch factor” so determinant?
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This article is a consequence of many conversations with international students from different tracks. In those, we would discuss the feeling that our programs were not pushing us forward, but instead they were forcing us to go back to deal with situations that, we thought, had no place in a Masters program of a renowned faculty. As it was said in the introduction, this feeling did not have to do so much with the actual content of courses, but rather with study group dynamics and the efforts that were needed to work with some Dutch students, who lacked skills, had low motivation and hardly engaged in group activities. In these discussions, we would also agree about the fact that this situation was not to blame to Dutch students themselves, but to the Faculty and, by extension, to the Dutch system of education. The main reasons behind this statement are three. First, there is the academic dimension: there are Dutch students who have been automatically admitted into the masters after three years of bachelor, working together with internationals who have gone through a very competitive selection procedure. Students belonging to this second group have typically graduated as the best of their class and for many (usually the non-EU internationals) it is common to have five years of training and one or more years of professional experience. This is
reflected in many aspects: the speed at which they can turn concepts into projects, their storytelling capacity, the knowledge they have of how things work outside academia and the level of their representation. Then, there is the institutional factor. This is a university that works as a public and democratic institution for Dutch students and as an exclusive and high-cost school for the non-European world. Besides this, there is the European framework that equals the trajectories of European bachelors and internationals, even if they are evidently different in terms of accumulated knowledge and skills. Although it could be said that this raises the level of BK, it could also be said that it lowers the internationals’ level. A whole argument about colonial practices around knowledge could be made here, but that is a discussion for another article. Third, there are expectations, both financial and academic. For internationals, being here is a privilege with a high cost: many either have bank loans or their families are making a huge investment in their education. For them, the two years at TU Delft must be worth it. Similarly, their academic expectations are high even before arrival: if everyone went through the same as they did, this place must be very good. This creates a sense of urgency and
