The lovely Dutch school that I’ve been attending this year is Hanze University of Applied Science, in short is the Hanze and in Dutch is Hanzehogeschool. I remember that on the first day at school, one of the teacher said “people might misunderstanding that ‘hogeschool’ means ‘high school’, but no, we are at the university”.

The Hanze is “the largest “university of applied sciences” in the northern Netherlands”. As it was founded in 1798, this year, we are celebrating its 215th anniversary. Thus, you can see the logo of “Hanze 215 lustrum” with the slogan “Share your talent, move the world” everywhere.

Moreover, the Hanze, with its Hanze University Foundation has many aid and development activities in in-developing countries. This year theme is Care 4 Kenya. You can find more information in the website or the Facebook page:

http://www.hanze.nl/home/International/About+Us/News/News+articles/hanze-215th-anniversary-celebration-with-care4kenya.htm
http://www.facebook.com/Hanze215.

By the way, the Hanze University Foundation is also our client for our upcoming fundraising event.

Let’s go back to the topic at hand: the Hanze. This is a school of more than 25,000 students and more than 70 bachelor and master programs! The Zerniker campus is the location of most of the Hanze’s departments (and some other departments from the University of Groningen) and where I study.
Unlike the classic “Quatier Latin” university buildings, the Zerniker’s have a modern architecture style. Each building of the Zerniker is more like the IUT Descartes building, but bigger, more modern, more colorful and more beautiful. And the Zerniker campus have a dozen of buildings like that (as far as I know, the Hanze has 9 buildings among them).

In addition, to my big surprise, the Hanze has the School of Sport studies, where students train to be professional in sport and the School of Fine arts, Design & Pop culture, where students can study painting, music. This brings a nice diversity to the university’s atmosphere.

My School of Communication, Media and IT is in the Van OlstToren building. It should be the tallest building of the campus, with the big logo of the Hanze on the top and in a quite…weird form. (By the way, I think the Dutch love challenging themselves with different weird architecture forms, instead of building usual rectangular buildings. Or maybe there are reasons that I don’t know yet).

In front of the building is a very nice place with the green glass, a fontaine, and the “walk of fame” that states the names of successful alumni or teachers of the Hanze.

When you enter the building, you can see the big hall and the atrium, with the canteen: the big and nice place where we usually have lunch, chat with the others or work with our team.

Within the building, there are other cafeterias, shops where you can print your papers or buy stationery, etc. Moreover, you can always find a nice place to work: there are many comfortable places to sit and public computers to use.

For an overall word about the campus, I really like the Hanze compus. The French and Vietnamese students must be very jealous with all the modern equipment and the nice atmosphere that we have here.

The only negative point to complain about is the canteen. Indeed, it is in the fast food style: you only can find there soup and snakes for hot meal, otherwise, they just have bread and some kind of salads like in the supermarket. Furthermore, there is not micro-wave for students and all the food in the building’s canteen is very expensive: a little bread with salad and sauce can cost 2 or 3 euros, and extra ham slice costs 0,5 euro.

Maybe that is the reason why at lunch time, you can see some students standing outside the classroom, having a very quick meal of two little sandwiches that they prepared from home.