University applications in beach car parks-an interesting start

Wednesday 4 July 2018

After the whirlwind that was the decision making process of my year abroad, it’s officially been decided that from this September until the end of January I’ll be living and studying in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Honestly getting this sorted has been an absolute roller coaster..and I think I’m only just getting used to the last minute changes and hurried filling in of forms.
While getting ready to go home for the weekend over the May bank holiday I got an email from the year abroad coordinator at my university, to say that she’d missed the deadline to send me the documents needed to complete the application to Utrecht, and that I had until Monday to complete the forms and choose my modules. Not too bad, apart from the fact that I then managed to lock myself out of my half-filled-in online application, and that the university’s international office was closed until the morning of deadline day.
I don’t know what it is about mums, but they’re even better than housemates at convincing you to come away from your work and enjoy yourself. After a shockingly blunt but concise and efficient call with one of the people in the international office on the deadline day I was left with ‘we’ll see if a technician can do anything.’ Which my mum saw as; you can’t do anything about it so you must go to the beach. Thankfully, after a testing car journey which I spent frantically checking my emails and reciting my Spanish oral exam presentation in a weird robotic murmur so that my sister wouldn’t elbow me, we got to the beach, and I got the glorious email to say that the problem had been fixed- my account was unlocked again.
Trotting away to the car in my ugliest non-matching beachwear (I was stuck with the nasty clothes that you don’t mind leaving at home during the semester), I set up a little makeshift desk area to finally fill out all the forms. Armed with my WiFi hotspot and hope that my 20% of data would last, I sat like some sort of internet addicted teen in the beach car park, with my laptop further burning my already pink thighs. After a good while of module choice and unexpected deposit details all was well again- and I was pretty proud that I’d managed to complete it all before my mum harassed me to get back to the beach.
It’s been a challenging but funny-in-hindsight experience so far, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come when the accommodation application opens..

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