The Transformative Impact of VU Honours on My Personal Journey

Yasmin
14 hours ago
3 min read

How it started

I'd been looking it up before I even started my bachelor's.

Not seriously, or at least, that's what I told myself. Just reading other students' experiences and checking the course list, like I was window shopping for something I hadn't decided to buy yet. By the time I actually applied, I'd probably researched it more than I'd researched my own degree.

So it wasn't that I didn't want to do it. It was more than wanting it so much that it made me nervous. What if it wasn't what I'd built it up to be? It was easier to keep it hypothetical a little longer.

I applied anyway. And finishing it is one of the things I'm most glad I did at VU Amsterdam.

What it actually is

The short version: it's extra courses, outside your normal degree, that you choose yourself. Some are within your faculty. Some pull you somewhere completely different: other departments, other buildings, once even across the city to UvA.

My five courses were: Open Source Investigation (at UvA), Cooperation and Competition, Psychiatry in Literature, Diversity in Clinical Practice, and From Survival to Revival: Towards Inclusive and Equal Behavioural Principles.

Written out like that, it looks a bit random. But somehow, living through them, they kept bumping into each other in my head. It also allowed me to explore topics I would not have been able to learn about otherwise.

Some moments that marked me

Psychiatry in Literature was the one that marked me the most early on. I went in thinking I'd be fine. I read a lot, I like discussing books, and I know how to talk about a text. The books alone were enough. We read things I'd never have picked up otherwise: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thérèse Raquin, Madame Bovary, to cite a few. Characters who are watched, diagnosed, and contained by the people around them. Reading them in that particular course made them feel completely different to how I imagine I'd have read them on my own.

Open Source Investigation was different. It was more outward-facing and connected with our current times. We were learning how to find and verify information in a world where everything is technically available and almost nothing comes with a guarantee. There was something strange about sitting in that room with students from different universities and realising that even the tools we use to understand the world are not neutral.

And "From Survival to Revival " was the hardest for me psychologically. It asked questions I didn't always know how to sit with. About whose knowledge is built, and who gets left out. I left some of those sessions feeling genuinely unsettled. I've come to think that was the most honest response I could have had.

What I took away...

Not a tidy answer to anything. More like: a better sense of where my thinking goes soft. Where I default to my own framework without noticing. Where I stop asking questions because I've already decided I know the shape of the answer.

That's not a comfortable thing to learn about yourself. But it's a real thing. And I think I needed a programme that sat outside my degree to show it to me. I also made friends I wouldn't have made otherwise.

My friends I made through the Honours Programme :)

Would I do it again?

Yes.

It's extra work on top of an already full degree, and I won't pretend there weren't moments where I wondered why I'd signed up for it. A Tuesday evening seminar after a full day on campus feels different in November than it did in September when you were still feeling optimistic about everything.

But I never once regretted it. The courses pulled me in directions I wouldn't have gone on my own and put me in rooms with people I'd never otherwise have met. That alone felt worth it.

If you're on the fence: apply. You can always decide later. The worst that happens is you learn something you didn't expect to.