30th edition Utrecht Summer School again draws record number of students

On Tuesday 5 July, Mayor of Utrecht Jan van Zanen will open the 30th edition of Utrecht Summer School during a festive kick-off in the Janskerk. It started as one course for twenty students from Bologna, but Utrecht University's Summer School ended up becoming the largest in Europe. Last year, more than 3,300 students of 120 different nationalities took one of the over two hundred courses. For this year, more students are expected to attend once again. For the first time, attendance for roughly twenty refugees has been made possible as well.

How many students have enrolled and which are the three countries most common for Summer School students to come from will be revealed during the opening ceremony. The ten ambassadors from the countries where the biggest numbers of participants come from have been invited for this purpose.

Refugees

A new development this year is that scholarships enable 20 refugees in the Netherlands to participate. "The Utrecht Summer School is an excellent combination of broadening and deepening your own curriculum at the highest level, in an international environment and in a relaxed, summery atmosphere with hundreds of peers. For refugees in the Netherlands who have qualified levels of previous education, taking a course might improve their future perspectives", Summer School Director Jeroen Torenbeek says.

New developments

This year, the Summer School will offer 240 courses, which vary from one to six weeks in length and cover all disciplines of Utrecht University, HU University of Applied Sciences and Utrecht School of the Arts. For students, the Summer School is an opportunity to broaden or deepen their horizons with courses their own universities do not offer.

Students from Asia and America

The course The Making of Europe, which was organised for the first time last year and has students study in Rome and Berlin for two weeks as well, was very successful. In every city, the focus is on another period: Ancient History in Rome, the Middle Ages in Utrecht and modern-day Europe in Berlin. The course will again be organised twice and is very popular among students from Asia and America.

More information

For more information about Utrecht Summer School, including a complete list of all courses, please visit www.utrechtsummerschool.nl.

Kick-off

The festive kick-off of the Summer School's 30th edition will take place on Tuesday 5 July from 4:30 pm to 7:00 pm in the Janskerk and will be attended by the students and the involved lecturers. You are very welcome to attend the Opening. Please sign up beforehand at summerschool@uu.nl.