Article by Miruna Tit
2nd-year student at Creative Business
During your Creative Business studies at HU, you have the opportunity to be part of the honours programme. That means you can take extra courses or projects besides your regular mandatory ones. It’s a great opportunity to expand your knowledge, meet new people, and develop yourself. When it comes to courses or projects, these mainly differ per block. But there are of course the ones that would be recommended to 1st-year students starting their honours journey such as “Starting honours”. The good part of the honours programme is that it offers you the chance to pick your own projects, work on those, and in the end get one star (the equivalent of working 140 hours). So, you can either take courses and projects offered or work on your own.
This year in block C, I took the Virtual Exchange project for which you can get a star. In this project, you work with students from different universities on a project on “Virtual Tourism”. This year’s partners were universities from Finland (Jyvaskyla) and Poland (Poznan). But these may change per year. You get the chance to learn more about other interesting countries, to develop your intercultural knowledge and skills and not only.
The project takes six weeks and I would call it rather ‘intense’ as you have a meeting and tasks to work for in each week. But it’s definitely doable and really enjoyable. Given the fact that you work in a group, you all contribute to the weekly tasks, and it’s way easier. The goal of these 6 weeks is to design a virtual tour of your cities. As mentioned earlier, the cities this year were Utrecht, Poznan, and Jyvaskyla. These are all student cities, so it’s great that you can also see how university life is in other countries. The workload towards this virtual tour at the end is split between the 6 weeks. We also had a week where we got the chance to get to know each other, as a group and as all students and teachers involved in the project. Throughout the project, we used different tools to meet, chat or work (e.g. Trello).
What I found interesting, was the chance we had to work on a tourism project, which I didn’t encounter in CB so far, so it really broadens my knowledge in that sense. The other students from Poland and Finland were part of different departments like language or tourism. So it was a great mix of students, we each came with our own knowledge from the programme we study, and we applied it to make our virtual tour. This tour showcased all the 3 cities and we could choose what format we want to do. For example, some groups did Instagram accounts, some did blog articles, online exhibitions, while my group created a video. If you are curious you can see it below.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed this honours project, working with students from different countries and getting to know other student cities. In the beginning, I expected this virtual exchange to be an ‘enriching experience’, which turned out to be true. Now that is over, I would really recommend it to other students.
Photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash