So far impressed by the TU Delft Dutch treat

I’m going on into my third week of being here in on exchange at TU Deft in the Netherlands.

My first week was all about getting acclimatized to the new time zone (I lived in LA for a month prior to arriving here), getting the keys to my new student accommodation flat, grokking how to navigate the area from flat to the uni. It’s a 20 minute walk. I haven’t bought a bicycle yet but plan to do so next week.

In the first week there was a full on awesome welcome induction program for international students with lots of activities like lectures, parties, games, museum, shopping, supermarket trips and lots of student organisation led activities. They even created a smart phone app I could use to manage the schedule and booking of activities. The highlight for me was creating a bicycle float with other international students for the Dutch city of Den Helder.

I was impressed how international TU Delft is. This year there are 2,082 international students here from 92 nationalities. I’m also impressed by scale and beauty of the buildings in campus and the spaces inside them. Like Industrial Design Engineering has its own building with a massive exhibition space in the middle of it and the most awesome bar and cafe. The library which is open until midnight is another awesome space to behold.

I’m starting to like Dutch culture of being direct in their communication and expecting that everyone in the team should express an opinion. There’s a lot of group work here which is awesome for me.

My second week started the Interactive Environments minor I’m doing for this exchange. I’m impressed that we were building prototypes by day 2. Day 4 we are playing with Arduino circuits and LED lights for the prototypes we’ve built. It’s so cool that we’re doing our classes in the Delft Science Center. The classes while fun and interesting goes on for the whole day Monday to Friday. So it’s gonna be a full on exchange semester for me.

Tonight we leave to go to the Ars Electronica 2016 Festival in Linz Austria to gather material for the minor.

Oliver Damian, 02110423, DAB