Former U.S.E. PhD candidate Kasia Karpinska wins the Pole of the Year prize

Kasia Karpinska, former PhD candidate at the Utrecht University School of Economics, has recently been elected as the Pole of the Year. According to the jury this researcher and lecturer is one of the examples that prove that preconceptions are not always right and that Polish migrants do make a positive contribution to Dutch economy, science and culture.

Kasia Karpinska (1980) first came to the Netherlands in 2003 as an exchange student. She fell in love with the country and decided to settle here permanently after completing her studies in Sociology. Various scholarships for excellent students from the Netherlands and Poland (for instance the Utrecht Excellence Scholarship) enabled her to study for a second master’s degree (Sociology and Social Research) in the Netherlands. After doing her PhD in the economics department of Utrecht University, she found a job as a lecturer and researcher at the Erasmus University. For her research, Karpinska collaborates with Polish universities in Warsaw and Krakow.