Assignment 5: EUP evaluation

Minor: European Union Policies. At my first hearing it seemed a very interesting minor even though I had no idea what I could expect. Nevertheless, I  still signed up for it and as the other minors were 100 percent boring according to my point of view, I thought EUP would be a good minor me. Unfortunately, at the end my expectations of this minor were not met. Still, because of a big letdown with a previous block of IBMS, I was not surprised by the somehow bad quality of EUP.

To make things different I will first mention about the aspects which I did like of the European Union Policies. The most important one is of course the EU trip. It was a good chance to experience the European Union as close as possible. We have seen the European Court of Justice, European Commission, European Court of Human rights and the European Parliament. Seeing and visiting all of these institutions was very interesting and also a fun thing to do. The EU trip was also a good opportunity to get better known with other EUP students resulting in a better group atmosphere throughout the minor.

Another thing I liked very much were the amount of classes, as there very little. Almost every 2 days of the week we had no classes. This gave the opportunity to study the theory and  work for a full day, but of course there was also chance for much nicer things to do.

Then the bad things about EUP. The first issue I want to mention are the classes. With classes I want to mainly refer to the Tutor group secessions and the trainings and lectures followed after to support the TG classes. The main purpose of the tutor groups is to activate a discussion between the students with an EU related subject. In most cases this was somewhat difficult to do, as we mostly did not have any background information. Instead the background information was given after the tutor groups took place. In my opinion this is wrong. I am more used to obtaining information beforehand and then having a to do an assignment.

Another big issue for me was the planning of the schedule. After the half of the minor this went from bad to worse. On some days we had 5 hours in between classes and what was even worse where the days in which we had 1 hour class. These classes were skipped for the most time as it was not worth the travel time.

With English it is a different story. The first half we only had classes related to the blogs. Even though I did not attend most of them, I heard from fellow students that the classes were bad after all. I think it would be better if we had made the blogs during class etc. This would give better view of progress but also would give the possibly to receive feedback at location. However , the second half was more useful. The debating gave us the chance to actually improve our English but also to learn to debate. I think these classes had very good added value to our EUP minor and overall course, which is IBMS for me.

Despite these issues , I am glad I took place in the EUP minor. It was a experience I would not like to miss.