It´s not exactly been busy on our blog the last weeks - a good sign for hard-working students trying to get the maximum out of their exams. It has in deed been pretty busy the last couple of weeks. A paper about new relationships of state, market and civil society with regard to sustainable progress and an oral exam meant the end to a challenging period for me. A period in which a natural scientist dove into the deep and murky waters of social science and struggled hard not to drown. After reading tons of papers and writing weekly papers plus a long final paper I was "ready" to face my professor in a 45 minute face-to-face exam. Well, I received my social science swimming badge (or how we call it in Germany: seahorse swimming award - Seepferdchen) and, though kinda relieved that the courses ahead are going to have a natural science focus, I even enjoyed my swimming lessons and could imagine immersing myself further in this field later during my studies. Just to give you some clue what we´ve been doing the last 10 weeks: the main focus was on new forms of governance that seek to redefine the roles of state, market and civil society. This involves emerging partnerships like the well-known Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or Corporate Social Responsibility. A very interesting and heavily debated field of research, so loads of papers to read. Now we´re enjoying a couple of well-deserved days off - one of the few points where I actually do miss the German university environment with its extra 2 months semester break in winter/spring. So, instead of following the example of some of my friends who will spend most of the next 2 months travelling, we´ll once again relocate our principal residence to the campus and the library. So what´s up next? I´ll have two different courses:
A) Ecosystem Modelling and
B) a research project
I hope that especially the research project, which is going to cover half of the next and the entire fourth period, will leave some room for our own input and interests. Apart from that I hope that this, for dutch standards, frosty winter is going to retreat soon and give way to spring. I´m missing those days and nights where the city centre around the oudegracht (the main canal in the centre for those of you who´ve never been to Utrecht) presents itself in the best, most charming light. If you´ve never been to Utrecht and would like to get a feeling of its charm just type "Oudegracht" into your Google Pic search. Maybe we can upload some pictures here as well in the future. But to be honest right now you don´t even wanna know how it looks like, all rainy and grey. Nope, I´m definitely not a big fan of autumn and winter. But at least we had quite some snow in the last weeks and I actually highly doubt it´s been the last snow we´re going to see this winter. Still, even temperatures around the freezing point are not going to keep some people from going surfing. So if the only thing that keeps you from doing your Master in the Netherlands is the fact that it´s not exactly known as a surfing mecca and if you don´t mind freezing your ..... off, then check out surfing in the Netherlands. A good spot seems to be Scheveningen/the Hague with an acceptable swell sometimes. I, for my part, will stick to playing football, basketball and squash till the sea water reaches degrees of at least 15+ again.
Best wishes to all of you!
Andy
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