In 2015 up to 20% of young people worldwide considered migrating because of high youth unemployment rates in their motherlands. upon arrival in they are forced to find their way and learn the language of their new countries to fully integrate into society. Roxana Rădulescu (27) from Romania has been living in Brussels for 3 years now and is working towards a PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Rădulescu made the deliberate choice to get her master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at VUB, so that her professors already knew her and she could prove that she had the skills and knowledge to get a PhD.
Thanks to her studies she had no trouble making friends. “My class had both international and Belgian students. Obviously it is easier to make contact with fellow international students, since they are in the same boat as you, but I also met a lot of Belgian students. Also, there are so many student organisations that set up parties and trips to Brussels. Through those activities I made a lot of friends and I integrated quickly.”
Roxana didn’t need to learn Dutch right away. French is taught as a second language in Romania which came in handy in Brussels. All she had to do was freshen up her French a bit. And all her classes were in English at university. Rădulescu wasn’t hampered by her limited knowledge of Dutch too much. “Last semester I started taking Dutch classes at night though, since I want to spend at least a few more years in Belgium and speaking Dutch is definitely an asset, as is speaking any other extra language.” Especially since most of her Flemish colleagues speak Dutch at work.
“At a university fair in Romania I got in touch in with VUB. I picked the university because its curriculum was very appealing and tuition fees are so much lower than in the UK. In Romania AI was still in its baby shoes.”
Obviously Rădulescu owes a great deal to her parents for making it possible to study abroad. “If my parents weren’t capable or willing to pay for my master’s program and housing in Brussels, I would have never left. This way I could totally focus on my study work without needing a part-time job to pay for housing, food etc.”betalen.”
Source: www.stampmedia.be
Copy and images: Iris De Bondt
Want to learn more about the Master of Science in Applied Sciences and Engineering: Computer Science? Visit we.vub.ac.be/en/master-computer-science
All English master programs? www.vub.ac.be/en/study/masters
The VUB Artifical Intelligence Lab? https://ai.vub.ac.be/