Not quite the student life that was promised
Translated by Thomas Ansell
The new Coronavirus regulations announced by the Dutch PM are set to change everyone’s lives for the next month or so. Now that the hospitality industry is shut, and students may no longer meet in large groups, the much-vaunted Dutch student experience has taken something of a battering. As reported by the Omrop Fryslân.
“It was something we excpected, but it’s really unfortunate that student associations can no longer organise physical activities”, says Iris van der Schoot, of the Osiris Student Society in Leeuwarden.
Any activity that had previously been organised must now be held online. “We want our members to keep in contact with eachother”, says Van Der Schoot. The student organisation noticed that its members still had to have some form of contact with eachother in the March lockdown. “People are just about fed up with sitting at home. At a certain point you get tired of just sitting in your student room, and you want to meet people that aren’t your housemates”, she says.
The affect will be a little less for this lockdown, says Van der Schoot, because people had expected it: “it’s become sort of normal”. The continuing lockdowns are beginning to affect organisations finances, too: “we have emergency reserves, which we can use. We are now trying to minimise our costs and keep our finances steady”, says Van der Schoot.
Afbeelding van Expressa Digital via Pixabay
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