Quite a few of the international students come from ‘orange areas’ and must therefore first be quarantined in Nijmegen. Others are allowed to participate in the physical orientation activities, such as the market in the Goffertpark. How’s their orientation going so far?

‘We really just saw each other for the first time’, Linnea Cederlund says with enthusiasm. The Swede has come to Nijmegen to follow a Master’s programme in Behavioural Science and hopes to get to know a few other international students this week.

‘Of course, it’s a bit awkward because you hardly see each other this week’, Linnea says as her orientation group stands in a circle around her. ‘But this is better than nothing. About ten of the twenty students in my group are now in home isolation because they are coming from an orange area, so they’re only present online.’

Linnea is happy that she didn’t have to stay at home and could walk around the orientation market in the Goffertpark on Tuesday. ‘I just got to Nijmegen last weekend.’

The online games are all well organised, she says, but it’s a poor consolation for the internationals in quarantine. ‘It’s not as much fun that almost everything is virtual, but you notice that the senior students really put a lot of effort into the orientation’, she says. ‘It makes me feel very welcome.’

Zoom

Not everyone is positive about the online activities. ‘You don’t really make friends this way’, sighs Moritz Lumma, a first-year Business Administration student from Germany. ‘There are sometimes as many as 60 students in a Zoom meeting. Only the ‘intro parents’ (senior students) talk then.’

The orientation market came at the right time for him: it’s a welcome offline activity with new people. ‘But I’m not really worried about less social contact’, he says. ‘I arrived here a week ago and I’ve already made friends in my student complex.’ The students who are exploring the market together with Moritz are disappointed that they can’t go out as usual, but they think they still can find fun activities outside the orientation. ‘If you’re afraid of coronavirus, don’t come to Hoogeveldt.’ Moritz winks at me. He thinks it’s sometimes a bit too cosy in the student complex.

Lara Schramke, a German Master’s student in Biomedical Science, is just happy that something is being organised for first-year students. ‘I didn’t think there’d be an orientation at all!’ Her move to the Netherlands means that she will be living closer to her family than before, and she likes that. ‘I used to study in Vienna. Now that I live in Nijmegen, I can visit more easily.’

The most remarkable orientation activity? ‘An online cycling course’, she says cheerfully. ‘We still can’t cycle, but now we know the traffic rules.’