Almost everyone has to deal with it at some point, making a study choice. Because there are so many courses in the Netherlands, it is not easy to make a choice. This article explains in a logical order how you can properly proceed when choosing your study.
Study choice test
It is advisable to start with a study choice test or career test. This is often taken at secondary school in 4 HAVO or 4 VWO. But if you don’t remember the results or you have never taken such a test, search the internet. There are plenty of study choice tests that give you a good idea of what you like.
If all goes well, the test will reveal a number of professions, studies and/or fields that interest you . Remember this well or write it down somewhere.
Study choice days
Study days are organized at various schools in the penultimate year. These are days when different teachers from different high schools come to a particular school to speak about their education. They will then tell you, among other things, what their training has to offer and what you can become with it. Usually you have to choose about five courses that interest you on a Sunday. You will then listen to a short presentation by the representative teacher of the relevant study for each of these courses. This can be very informative and it often becomes clear which studies are really not for you.
It is smart to choose the five study presentations that you will attend based on your study choice test.
Training information on the internet
After the study day mentioned above, you probably have a rough idea of what you like and what you don’t. You can then look up the courses that you liked and that you would like to know more about on the internet. This is a website where almost all courses in the Netherlands are listed with a lot of information.
Here you will find information about what the study itself entails, where you can follow the study, how long the study lasts, comparable studies, what you can become with the study, when there are open days and information about the quality of the study. Basically everything you need to know. It should be noted that the dates of the open days are not always complete. If you want to visit an open day of a particular school, it is smart to take a look at that school’s website, where you will often find more information.
Once you have looked at the information about the studies that interest you most, you can probably cross some studies off your list. Often because the content of the study is not what you thought or because the study is in a city where you cannot easily get to.
Open days and walk-along days
Now that you still have a small number of studies left, or perhaps only one, you can see when and where there are open days or shadowing days. It can be smart to visit open days of the same study in different cities. This means you know what the different schools and cities look like and it may be easier for you to make a choice. You will also find out the latest information on the open days and you can ask anything you want to know.
With shadowing days you shadow a student who is already following the relevant course. You also attend lectures and see how everything works at higher school.