Internationals disappointed
KEI week is still Dutch at heart
‘Stichting KEI welcomes all first-year students to Groningen’, the English front page of the KEI website reads. ‘Students from all over the Netherlands and far beyond gather here to start their new life.’ If you click through to the page for participants, it again says that the KEI week is ‘the general introduction week for all prospective first-year and transfer students’.
All students. Javiera Hernández Yáñez from Chile didn’t feel included at all, though. ‘It’s like I was in the wrong place’, she says.
When Javiera, who’s starting a master in educational sciences, signed up for the KEI week, she indicated her preference for a mixed group of Dutch and international students, where everyone would be speaking English. Other options on the form were an all-international or an all-Dutch group.
Ignored
She was added to a WhatsApp group chat at the beginning of the week, where she eagerly introduced herself to everyone. ‘I was totally ignored’, Javiera says. Nobody welcomed her and the group continued chatting in Dutch, without a single message in English.
I am never participating in the KEI week again
She realised she had been placed in an all-Dutch KEI group and sent the KEI team an email asking to change groups – the KEI website advises you to notify them of changes in case of an emergency. Javiera, however, never received a response. And since she didn’t have a Dutch telephone number yet, she couldn’t call the organisation, either.
It wasn’t until the second half of the week that she managed to join her roommate’s mixed KEI group. But by then, it was already too late to really connect. ‘I honestly don’t think my 40 euros were worth it at all’, she says.
Language barrier
KEI moms and dads faced similar problems: some asked for all-Dutch groups, but were assigned to international-only groups. That happened to Paulien Slats, a Dutch economic geography master student, and her friend Wendy Doddema. ‘I wanted to show the students around the city, but I wasn’t able to do so in English’, says Wendy.
When they turned to the KEI board on Monday morning, they were told it was too late to do anything about it. ‘They said it was our problem now and gave us a third leader to help out’, says Paulien. While she had a wonderful experience after this, Wendy can’t say the same. ‘I am never participating in the KEI week again’, she says.
Even when first-years and KEI parents did get the group they asked for, things didn’t always go smoothly. Dutch history student Ale ten Cate and his fellow KEI leader were hoping to introduce their international KEI kids to Dutch student association life and take them to Aegir and Albertus. ‘But they wanted to go to SIB events, for instance, so we had to switch up our planning to fulfil their needs’, Ale says. ‘I would advise KEI to notify leaders earlier of the groups they are paired with.’
Handful of English events
Then there was the lack of English-language activities. ‘The website advertised it as quite an international event, if not 50/50’, says first-year student Filip Kotowski from Poland. On arrival however, he was met with predominantly Dutch-language activities. ‘There were a handful of events, like SIB or the information market, where you didn’t need to know Dutch.’
Even the KEI organisation’s messages switched over to Dutch in mid-summer, KEI leader Malo Lecomte, a French biology student, noticed. The app was originally in English, but once the KEI week kicked off, he only received important updates in Dutch. ‘I like being organised and updated on what’s happening for the benefit of my KEI kids, but that was impossible’, he says. Malo also noticed that ‘all the cultural events were only in Dutch’, which limited his options to SIB lectures and ESN events.
It reinforces the segregation between international and Dutch students
Half Dutch, half English Emma Smith, a minorities and multilingualism student, was shocked by the lack of English during KEI week. ‘Almost everything on the KEI Instagram page was in Dutch. Hardly any English captions were provided and a lot of the translations were inaccurate or incomplete’, she says. Speeches by the KEI board and others, as well as the DJ sets, were all in Dutch.
‘If I were a new international student, I would have felt really unwelcome’, she says. ‘When you move to the Netherlands, you expect things to be in Dutch, but when an introductory event is predominantly in Dutch and you don’t understand, it’s disheartening. It reinforces the segregation we have between international and Dutch students in this city.’
Expectation management
But the KEI board is not at fault here, chairman Lars Eltingh feels. Students’ experience of KEI week, he says, depends on expectation management and what students make of it themselves. ‘KEI week hardly advertises itself as being a fully international event’, he says. ‘It’s a Dutch introduction week in which we accommodate English speakers. If we do this format largely in English, we won’t reach the people we really want to reach.’
Students were never given a guarantee about the group they would be placed in, Eltingh stresses. They could indicate a preference when they signed up on the website, but: ‘It’s not a contract.’
It’s a Dutch introduction week in which we accommodate English speakers
The problem was that there weren’t enough KEI leaders who wanted mixed or international groups. ‘So the people who were in charge of creating the groups had to make some sacrifices. They had to play a lottery for the Dutch leaders who wanted an all-Dutch group.’
Nevertheless, Eltingh says, the KEI organisation is doing everything it can to offer an introduction week in English, without taking anything away from the experience for the Dutch students. ‘We hired international advisors to help set up and coordinate the events for international students.’
And they’re already thinking about what they can do differently next year. ‘One possible solution would be to tie the number of participants to the number of KEI leaders, meaning the organisation will only accept as many international students as there are KEI parents willing to lead them’, Eltingh says. That wouldn’t be the organisation’s first choice, though. ‘That would probably mean we’ll have fewer international students during KEI week than in previous years.’