Tips: Preparations (For My Undergrad Friends)

Yesterday I visited the town of my undergrad uni and met up with some friends who are currently in their last year of undergrad. Without fail, they are all planning on leaving the Netherlands and study abroad next year. It is for them that I write this post; a list of practical tips when studying abroad. Be advised, there'll be no hints on how to apply etc. because that differs per uni (except: apply as early as possible).

• Make a list of companies and institutions that you need to contact... this means your insurance agencies (health, travel, etc.), your bank, your phone provider, make it as complete as possible.
• Visit their websites and see what their regulations are for you living abroad for an extended period. If there's no info on there, don't hesitate to contact them. Most will have no issue with it whatsoever, but then at least you have a good to-do-list before you leave. 
• On health insurance: you will be obligated to keep your Dutch health insurance despite whatever insurance you pick while abroad, unless you get a job. In the UK, you will be eligible for NHS; for this, visit your closest GP, ask for the registration form and fill it out. It will take up to 8 weeks or so for your card to arrive in the mail including all your information, but from then on you won't have to worry about UK health insurance. Do be aware that you need to have a valid UK address and plan to live there for more than 6 months (no requirements on having lived in the UK before).
• On banking: it's best to inform your bank that you'll be living abroad, so they won't, for instance, block your debit card for unusual transaction patterns. Also, if you have ING, make sure your Dutch phone number is registered as '+31' so you can receive your TAN-codes wherever you are and change your phone number without hassle. I'm not familiar with other banks, but in any case it's best to just find the nearest branch, make a physical visit and ask about peculiarities.
  In the UK, you'll most likely be subjected to a 3-month trial period on your bank account because you'll have no credit rating whatsoever. In order to open a bank account, bring your passport and just to be sure bring a letter from your uni addressed to you on your UK address, so a) you can show you ARE in fact studying there and b) the bank will know it's a serious address on which you really live. The UK has no such thing as our GBA, so in a sense serious mail addressed to you on your address is the only way for any company or institution to know that you actually do live there and aren't just faking it. Also, they'll prefer it if you register a UK phone number but since you won't be able to get a UK phone subscription without a bank account, they will usually accept a Dutch number. Change it to your UK number as soon as you've got one.
• On phones: What you do with your Dutch phone is up to you. If you can, it's probably better to change it to a top-up plan if your subscription has run out, preferably one in which you can also top-up via internet or text, so you won't be stuck with Dutch subscription fees per month.
  In order to get a UK phone, most phone companies will be very hesitant to sign you up for a subscription, because of your lack of credit rating, and you won't be able to get one at all without a UK bank account. From personal experience, I know 02 does subscriptions without a credit rating, but you'll have to pay a 100 pound deposit which you'll get back three months later (or can leave on your account so they'll take the subscription fee from the deposit in the months afterwards, until the deposit runs out).
  You can also get a phone using a top-up plan. That's way easier, as you can spend as little as you  want on the Sim-card and phone, won't have to suffer the credit check and can get it everywhere. 
• On the GBA: You can only get "uitgeschreven" from the GBA within five days of you moving abroad. Most likely, your municipality will allow you to do this online, for which you'll need a DigiD. Seeing as you have stufi, you have DigiD... if you don't, I suggest you get a DigiD NOW. You will need to de-register with the GBA.
• On DigiD: Make sure the number registered for text-validation is a +31 number so you can receive texts abroad and change your number if necessary. 
• On stufi: DUO is wildly annoying when it comes to studying abroad. You'll need to make sure of a number of things. One of them is letting DUO know you'll be studying abroad, and you'll need to do this as soon as possible because it can take them up to 3(!) months to deal with your request, leaving you possibly without stufi for the first few months (you will get your stufi eventually, with retrospective effect, but your first few months are the most expensive and having your stufi then makes them much easier). You'll furthermore be eligible for the whopping extra 147 euros because your tuition fees are higher than the regulated Dutch fees, but in order to get this you'll need to send them proof of your tuition fees being that high. The acceptance letter from your uni (which'll specify this) will do. They'll also want to know your address abroad, but you can leave this empty until you actually know your new address. Do this stuff early enough and you won't have to deal with them very often. Email doesn't work, you'll have to call them if something goes wrong.
• UPDATE: On doing English language tests: If you've been at RA your English should be sufficient. Nevertheless, most UK unis still require you to take a TOEFL/IELTS (I think there's only a handful that waive them, among them Oxbridge... I think.), despite the letter that you've received education in English for three years and even if you have a letter from a professor supporting your English proficiency. Take the test as soon as possible. TOEFL is in Arnhem, in a place that takes forever to find, and it really isn't very difficult if your English is relatively decent. Basically; if your English was good by RA standards, you'll get a good score on the TOEFL without practicing (heck, you'll have been practicing for three years). 
• The key to everything is start early. Not because you have to, but because that way you'll have a time-margin to deal with the bureaucratic stupidity that comes with most companies and institutions. 

If you're thinking of studying abroad next year and I haven't covered it here, feel free to contact me or comment below... and GOOD LUCK! :)

About Me: And after?

Oooooh, that dreaded question. "So, what are you going to do after this?"

Well, I've got four plans.

A) I will apply for PhD programme 1: the doctorate in cultural and global criminology (dcgc), which is part of the Erasmus Mundus programme and which will allow me to do time (hihi, like a prison, get it? Sorry.) in Kent, Utrecht and Hamburg (and maybe Budapest). Deadline: 8 January 2013. http://www.dcgc.eu/

B) I will apply for DPhil programme 1/2 (depends on whether you count DPhil as PhD, because it is in fact just a PhD with a different order of abbreviations): which is at Oxford... I would love to have Federico Varese as a supervisor because I loved Mafias on the Move. And also, Oxford. Deadline: January 18 2013.

C) I will apply for PhD programme 2/3: this is one I'll have to arrange all by myself. I could stay in Leicester and try to work with Yvonne Jewkes, author of Media and Crime, and maybe try to get a second supervisor from another Uni; I'm dying to work with Christiana Gregoriou, because of Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives, but I'm not sure if such a construction would work out (and whether they'll be interested in supervising my PhD). It would be epic, though, if it would work out.

D) I will apply for a Rijkstraineeship, which is a 2-year government programme where you get to work at the ministry that best matches your interests. Also an interesting option for after a PhD. http://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/wat-is-het-rijk/beroepsgroepen/?adm_pin=01770

After that? Well, considering that if I get to go into A/B/C and afterwards D, I'll have filled the next 5-7 years of my life, I think that for now I get to say that I've planned enough. Except, of course, that I haven't. But everything afterwards isn't set in stone.

Yet.

Leicester Adventure: Doubts

You can't help but to sometimes doubt whether you've made the right decision.

One of my most persistent doubts is whether I'm actually good enough to be (and remain) in academia... being in academia, after all, does mean that every day you're surrounded with brilliant minds with brilliant ideas and with brilliant papers published in brilliant journals. But in those moments, I'd do well to think of what a senior professor once told me; "you don't have to be the smartest to cut it in academia, you just have to be really interested in something".

Another serious doubt is whether I'll get a job once I'm done. I'm capable of doing loads of stuff, I know that - if anything, I can go back to my old job of being a court clerk, I could live off such a salary - but it's the doubt of whether I'll find anything that can keep my interest for forty years. I do want to be an instructor, after all. But I don't have to find my dream job straight out of grad school - I should just try to get any job in my field (which ranges from pure law enforcement to government to academia, after all) and then as soon as a job closer to my dream opens up, move into that. I'll worry about my retirement fund being scattered and all over the place later - I'll have study debts to clear up first, then.

Currently I also wonder whether I'll fit in with the English locals. I don't mean townies, though I'm sure the people of Leicester are wonderful, but I mean with the English students. But while in Oxford, Kristy assured me that I seemed so well at ease there, and more people have told me that England is a place I'll like even for extended periods of time. Well. We'll see, won't we?

About Me: Why Leicester?

The other day I received a formal message from the University of Leicester's Accomodation Services people that I am to arrive in Leicester on Sunday, September 30. Since receiving this, I have been mentally preparing myself. But why on earth did I choose Leicester in the first place? It's not in the top 100 of universities according to the most recent QS ranking (2012/2013) NOR Times Higher Education ranking (2011/2012); in fact, Leicester is almost embarrassingly proud of having risen from 195 to 185 in QS, and is 197 in THE. For comparison, Utrecht (of which Roosevelt Academy is a part) is respectively 85 and 68. Leicester is a member of the 1994 Group, but not of the way more influential Russell Group, which contains elite places like Oxford and Cambridge and indeed, most of the UK universities most attended by RA alumni. I'm not one to go for the standard choices when it comes to picking out schools - second of my elementary school EVER to attend the Helinium secondary school afterwards, and first of the Helinium to attend RA - but my choice seems fairly extraordinary even to my standards.

The history of my attempts to go and study abroad is fairly straightforward, but long and a bit sad at the beginning. I guess in a way it starts at a sleepover at 17, when three friends and I discussed our futures - I had my mind dead set on Roosevelt Academy, though Tilburg (never Rotterdam or Leiden - everyone was going there) was a back-up option, and I confided in them that I really would like to study at Cambridge if I was good enough - but I didn't think I was, so I never bothered.

When February 2012 rolled around, it hit me that I really did ought to get started on my applications for my master's programmes - I had drifted off into a slumber and suddenly people started talking about the statuses of their applications, which did wake me up but a little too late for my own good, like finally waking up after pressing 'snooze' four times. I scrambled to get myself together, saw that Oxford's Criminology deadline had already passed - but I didn't really want to go to Oxford back then anyway - and that Cambridge's was open until March 1. I sent in a crappy application, though I did get a letter of recommendation from Roosevelt Academy's interim dean, because the lower limit was a 3.8 GPA and if I got all As that semester (interesting bit of arguing on my side, there, too, that this was a possible feat for me) my final GPA would be 3.77 and really, that 0.03 difference and my extracurriculars (which are not nearly as impressive as I made them sound) should still get me that letter (I can be persuasive, but only when I really need to be). And then I waited, because I figured that if I didn't get in I'd go to a Dutch university and be done there. All in all, I thought I had it all figured out.

When the rejection came halfway through April, I was devastated for a night (a state of mind that yes, does include Domino's pizza, chocolate mousse and lots of cheap white wine), pulled myself together the morning after, thought of what to do next, and thought of this one book that I'd bought the month before.

See, the month before Kristy and I had attended a conference on a topic in a field almost completely unrelated to Criminology, but still one of my interests (and Kristy's field entirely) - we'd gone to Oxford to listen to academics speak about science and literature (because to literature and linguistics scholars, psychology and psycho-analysis are apparently also sciences, like cognitive science). Being the book-lovers that we are, Kristy and I scoped out Blackwell's almost immediately upon arriving (picking out the nearest bookshop as soon as possible is an activity we inadvertently repeated in Malta, though in no way is that Maltese bookshop allowed to compare itself to Blackwell's), and I chanced upon not one book, but an entire shelf dedicated to books on crime and media alone. I was a happy woman (actually, I experienced a sort of sense of relief not unlike what I felt when I finally saw Tutankhamun's death mask after gazing at pictures for over a decade), especially since I had been searching for a justification to being interested in law, criminology and stylistics simultaneously for over a year, and vowed that if I had enough pounds left by the end of our three-day-stay, I'd buy the book that appealed to me most. I did have just enough pounds left (though I think I would have been capable of purchasing the entire shelf had I not been scared into self-control by RyanAir's carry-on weight restrictions) and bought the book.

So on that dreadful April morning I picked up this book to see who had written it, for I remembered that it was a professor of Criminology somewhere in the UK. What had devastated me the night before was not just being rejected by the university that I had had a university crush (you know, being infatuated with the university itself) on since I first visited the town on a school trip at 14, but also losing the opportunity of going abroad, and the realization that I really was done with the Netherlands. So I panic-applied to three other UK universities that had Criminology/Criminal Justice programmes, and then finally turned to the author of this book, and saw that she taught at the University of Leicester when that book was published. I went to the website, saw she still taught there, saw that they had one of the few actual Departments of Criminology in all of the UK (and even North-West Europe, for in the Netherlands it's often part of the Department of Law, and it's not much different in Belgium and Germany) and that they offered, hold on, not just an Optional Module in Crime and Media (YES!) but also in Transnational Policing (Organized Crime, my other obsession!), Psychology of Evil (How can I not take anything named like that?) and a number of other things that sounded so... ME. I wrote the best application letter I have ever written and will ever write in my life (because applying because of one specific feature that makes you giddy and enthusiastic like a five-year-old in a field that leaves you obsessed like a sixteen-year-old tends to do that), pestered RA's new dean for a letter of recommendation and told my law professor I needed one, like, now. I got in.

Am I still sad about Cambridge's rejection? No. I am angry, though. But angry is good - I was arrogantly annoyed with Leicester for demanding that I take a TOEFL and then I scored really well despite being hungover, tired and despite being done with the test in what seems to be a record time because I wanted to get back to summer school in Middelburg, just to prove to Leicester that I found this demand ridiculous - so I hope this anger can fuel my motivation to prove to Cambridge that they were gravely off in rejecting me.
Am I at peace with my situation? Yes. I'm not sure if I would have been happy at Cambridge, and for now I don't know yet whether I'll be happy at the University of Leicester, but at least the programme seems more tailored to fit my personal obsessions. Leicester is, in a way, my second first choice, and once the RA alumni survey comes my way, I'll definitely be filling it out to say that I did get into my first choice master's programme.