The Dutch tend to speak their minds, often regardless of hierarchical or age differences. From an early age, kids are encouraged to have an opinion and to voice it. So don’t be surprised if during your first lecture a Dutch student raises his finger and says, ‘I disagree, professor!’ In the UT academic culture, asking critical questions and launching heated discussions is a virtue, not a vice.

Say goodbye to rote learning – memorizing information by repetition and on the assumption that the teacher is always right – and say hello to meaningful learning, which centres on understanding and making new connections. When a professor or student here ask you a question, they won’t want you to reproduce ‘the right answer’, but to present a reasonable line of thought based on analysis and creativity.

As the most entrepreneurial university in Europe, we have gained a strong reputation for facilitating start-ups. This has resulted in more than 1,000 start-ups to date, such as Booking.com, Scisports, Fokker Aerostructures, Robird/Clear Flight Solutions, Demcon, Ramani, Lionix International, Hy2care, and Athom. So if it’s your ambition to launch a startup, we’re with you. But you don’t have to set up your business to benefit from the entrepreneurial mind-set and skills we cultivate at the UT. In our programmes, you will learn which roles suit you best, how to step forward with good ideas, how to mobilize resources and much more. You’ll appreciate the fact that at the UT, we rewarding creativity, innovation and guts. In an unpredictable and rapidly changing world, we focus all of our education and research on developing relevant answers for societal challenges, with key themes such as intelligent manufacturing, resilient world, digital society, health tech and smart materials.

Ever heard of Student-Driven Learning (SDL)? We practically invented it, because we want you to take control over your own learning process. It means we offer you a lot of room for making your own choices, from planning your study time to taking different subjects and Master’s specializations– all with intensive personal mentoring, of course: we’re here to help you advance.