Page 308 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Last in this section, I’d like to thank some people from the Groningen PhD crowd whom I particularly liked hanging out with because of the interesting conversations, the mutual complaining, the e cient drinking pace, the good music taste and enjoyable concert or festival visits, the high quality gossip, and the staying out way too late (for my age) in the city in places that shall not be named out loud. Obviously not all reasons apply to everyone, but I think you can gure that out for yourselves. Olivier, Elwin, Christian, Daniel, Daniele, Martijn, Markus, and Sabrina, thank you all!
More boards, less bored
In the beginning of 2016, some other BSS PhD students shared my frustration that our faculty did not have a PhD council. As a consequence, we established a council ourselves. Dorijn, Lonneke (I hope you have found your peace), Marloes, Jet, Vera, and Anne: ank you for making the council a success and for the pleasant meetings!
It might have been a good idea to cut down on the extracurricular activities in the last year of a PhD. But then again, I had never been part of the PhD Day organisation and obviously this was my last chance. So at the end of 2016 I joined the Program Team of the PhD Day 2017. e Program Team consisted of ambitious people from di erent backgrounds – all of whom were very nice and e cient to work with. Ximena, Minita, Sophie, Laura, and Raúl: ank you for the good times and your e ort in making the 2017 PhD Day’s programme awesome.
How the academic journey continues
Due to being involved in GOPHER and the BSS PhD council, and attending talks about researcher education at conferences, I got more and more interested in the PhD trajectory as a subtopic of educational research. Hence, I am very happy that one of my postdoc projects focuses on PhD students. I’d like to thank Lou de Leij and Marjan Koopmans from the Groningen Graduate Schools for the opportunity to do this research.
By interviewing pre-university teachers and students I realised once again how important it is for students to have knowledgeable and enthusiastic teachers, not only because from these teachers students will likely learn the most and because they can help them get ready for university, but also because passionate teachers have the means to trigger students’ interest for a certain eld or topic. Unfortunately, some school subjects, especially the science subjects, are su ering
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Acknowledgements
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