Hi, my name is Mick van der Vloet. I am a 2^nd year student at HAN Automotive Engineering. In a series of blogs I am going to be talking about my life at and around HAN. I will start with a short introduction of who I am and where I’m at in the course.

Let’s start off with what I do in my spear time. When I come home from the HAN Campus I probably make some food for myself, as studying makes me very hungry. After that I will start with my homework. Usually I finish this a few hours after dinner. This leaves me with a free evening. Most of the time I will watch a movie or a show as most of us do, but when I have a late start the next day I will drink some beers with my roommates or friends. I try to keep my weekends free of homework so I can do whatever I like. This often means working on my car during the day and drinking beers in the evening. For the people that are wondering, I own a Mazda Miata and a Volkswagen Beetle. When Monday comes around this schedule will start all over again.

As I stated earlier, I’m a 2^nd year Automotive student, but it is my first year having classes at HAN, due to a small thing called COVID. I have to say it is great to be at school and getting to know my classmates. You may wonder why I enrolled for the English course while being a Dutch student. It comes down to multiple factors.

The first reason is that I wanted to meet new people with different backgrounds. I have been surrounded by Dutch students all my life and really wanted to get to learn from different cultures. This has been really fun so far. I mostly got to know the people in my project group, this is a subgroup of a class, in which you will do the practical’s and projects, but this year the classes got rearranged. This meant new faces and other people to get to know again.

I also chose the English course to prepare for my working career. Since the automotive industry is an international scene, I heard from some Dutch students that some of their books where in English but the classes in Dutch, which can be very confusing. Also the team I wanted to join from the start of my enrolment at HAN was an English team. All things considered, English was the best option for me.

During the first year it was hard to meet my class mates. All the classes where online. Looking back at it, I don’t know how I managed to stay motivated whilst sitting at home 24/7. Being back at school has so many advantages. For example it is harder to skip a class since it is at school. Also, it is way easier to ask a question to a teacher about the learning materials. Lastly it helps a tremendous amount with my work ethic and this is also applies for my fellow students.

I hope you’ve got a slight insight in who I am and what I do. In the next post I will be talking about the workload and the different student teams and activities around campus!

Mick van der Vloet

Read also these blogs:

• Mick’s role in one of the student teams
• Mick’s project cars