‘We started the collaboration with Australia in 2012 based on an overwhelming demand of our students,’ says Inge Broekman, UT’s Country Coordinator for Australia. ‘All Bachelor’s students in their third year have the opportunity to do something different, go abroad, and suddenly everyone wanted to go to Australia. We therefore decided we had to enhance the possibility for them to go.’
World Solar Challenge
Inge Broekman is also one of the members of the official UT delegation that will travel to Australia later this week. She will be accompanied by the UT president Victor van der Chijs, the dean of the Faculty of Engineering Technology Geert Dewulf and Hetty Bennink from the Strategy & Policy department.
‘The goal of this visit is to strengthen the collaboration with our existing partners and to increase our visibility. Because although many UT students want to go to Australia, it’s a challenge to get Australians interested in Twente. And if there are no Australian exchange students here, no UT students can go to Australia,’ explains Broekman and she admits that the timing of the visit was chosen because of the World Solar Challenge, which will start on Sunday.
‘Yes, we are going to support our Solar Team Twente, which is competing in the race. This team and their solar car is something we are very proud of and we want to cheer them on,’ adds the Country Coordinator. ‘Not to mention that the World Solar Challenge is a great way to promote the UT’s visibility in Australia.’ The delegation is going to visit different universities, local authorities and a startup hub in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne - all with ties to UT research and education.
Student’s opinion
Why is it so important to create strong ties with Australia? ‘The demand of students is at the core of this collaboration, so you would have to ask them,’ says Broekman. And so we did. ‘I wanted a good university outside of Europe where English is spoken at Bachelor’s courses,’ says Ingmar Loohuis, a UT student who recently returned from a semester at the University of Melbourne.
‘It was a really great experience. Melbourne is one of the best cities to live in. It’s so different from Enschede,’ continues Loohuis. ‘I would definitely recommend it to everyone, because when else will you get a chance to live abroad for six months. But even though Australia is great, only a few people from Twente can go there. Students from Melbourne have hundreds of choices where to spend their semester abroad, so it’s difficult for the UT to catch their interest.’
Can that be changed? ‘We have a real student culture at the UT, which is something that doesn’t really exist in Melbourne,’ thinks Loohuis. ‘It’s too expensive to live at the campus in Melbourne, so most people stay at their parents. Here, everyone is at the campus. Plus, we have a lot of student teams – the Solar Team, for example -, and so that is something we should highlight.’
