Maastricht student stories and questions

In the first tutorial I genuinely thought I had made an administrative mistake and entered a class for people who already had law degrees. Everybody seemed to have an argument ready. They could refer to the text without looking for the page. I had read everything, but the moment somebody asked what I thought, my brain offered absolutely nothing. For a few weeks I treated every confident answer as proof that I was behind. Then I started noticing the pauses, the tabs open under the table, and the way people repeated each other with slightly different wording. Some people really were very prepared. Some were simply more comfortable speaking before their thoughts were finished. I am still learning how to do that. What helped was preparing one question rather than trying to predict the whole discussion. A question gives me somewhere to enter. Once I have spoken once, the second time is easier. I wish somebody had told us that PBL is not only learning the material. It is also learning how to be visibly uncertain in front of other people.

I know every individual step probably makes sense to the person who designed it. Together, though, the process feels like a scavenger hunt where the clues arrive in different inboxes. One portal says my documents were received. Another says something is incomplete. An email tells me not to worry if the status has not changed, but does not say how long not worrying should last. I have reference numbers for things I no longer remember applying for. The hardest part is that this is not just paperwork to me. It is housing, moving, money, and months of planning. When a status stays grey, my brain does not read “processing.” It reads “your entire plan might fail for a reason you have not found yet.” I do not need official information from another student. I mostly need to know I am not the only one refreshing a page that explicitly says no action is required.

I had travelled before, but never with all my important documents and most of my life inside luggage I could barely lift. The flight was straightforward. The part that frightened me was landing tired and having to make ordinary decisions in an unfamiliar system. Which train? Do I need a reservation? What if the flight is late? Can I carry everything fast enough when the platform changes? I wrote the route in several places and saved screenshots as if the internet would personally abandon me on arrival. The journey was not elegant. I stood in the wrong place once and asked two basic questions. I still arrived. That gave me more confidence than any perfect travel plan could have.

At first the programme chat was useful because everyone had the same practical questions. Then it slowly became a social room with its own jokes, regular voices, and unwritten rules about who belonged there. I do not think anyone deliberately decided to exclude people. Still, there were moments when somebody asked a normal course question and the response was basically: why are you here, who added you, prove you are really in the programme. Maybe there were reasons to keep the group relevant. The tone made it feel like access to basic peer information depended on being socially recognised. Large chats always develop a centre and an edge. The people in the centre forget the edge is reading. I would like us to remember that the quiet account asking about a book or a deadline may be a real classmate who is already nervous about entering an established room.

At home, some expectations were presented as facts: what a respectable future looks like, how relationships should work, which choices create shame, and how much of yourself belongs to family. Moving did not immediately free me from those ideas. It made them visible. I met people whose normal was completely different. That did not mean their version was automatically better. It showed me that rules I had treated as universal were cultural, familial, and open to examination. This has made conversations with home more difficult. My family hears a changed opinion as rejection. I experience it as finally deciding what I believe. I do not want independence to become contempt for where I came from. I want enough space to keep what feels loving and question what was maintained through fear.

For the first weeks, conversations followed a template. Where are you from? What do you study? Where do you live? Are you going to the event? The questions helped us locate each other, but they did not give me much to hold onto. The useful details appeared accidentally. Someone complained about a book they had been given and offered it to anybody who wanted it. A person argued passionately for a film everyone else considered terrible. Somebody talked about hair for twenty minutes with enough expertise to make it interesting. Music escaped from a room. A game appeared on a table. A housemate cooked something unfamiliar and accepted questions. These moments made people specific. I think ordinary interests are especially important in an international group. Country and language are easy categories, so we lean on them. They can become the whole introduction. A person starts representing a place before anybody knows what makes them laugh. Shared interests create another route. They let two people connect without asking either to explain a culture, a degree, or a future plan. They also create low-pressure social life. I am not always ready for a party. I can watch a film while tired. I can walk to find coffee. I can sit beside someone playing a game without producing constant conversation. An activity gives the interaction somewhere to rest. University culture likes to make interests productive. Sport is wellbeing. A society is networking. Reading improves the degree. Music becomes an event. Sometimes the value is simply that an hour passed pleasantly with another person. I started asking second questions when somebody mentioned a small interest. What kind of music? Which game? What do you cook when you miss home? Did you actually like that series or only finish it? The answers created plans more naturally than trying to announce that I wanted friends. My week now contains people from different courses and countries, but that is not how I think of them first. I think of the person who always has a film recommendation, the one who knows how to fix clothes, the one who turns breakfast into an event, and the one who is terrible at the same game as me. The official introduction questions helped us arrive. The unimportant questions helped us stay.

I told myself I would relax after I got in. Then I started searching for the course structure, book lists, preparation advice, student jobs, and every possible way to avoid arriving behind. At some point I was studying for a semester that had not started because being excited felt too close to being unprepared. I closed the documents for a week. Nothing collapsed. The degree remained available. Preparing is useful. Resting before a major move is also preparation, even if it produces no checklist item.

When I tell people what I study, the next question is usually what kind of lawyer I want to become. The honest answer is that I am not even sure whether I want to become a lawyer. That answer seems to disappoint people. A law degree sounds like a straight road from the outside: study law, become lawyer, wear serious clothes, argue professionally. The more I learn, the less straight it looks. Different countries have different qualification routes. Language matters. National law matters. Some jobs need additional study, some do not, and half the interesting possibilities have titles nobody outside the field recognises. I chose an international programme because I liked the idea of studying systems across borders. I also chose it because I was good at writing, cared about politics, and had no single profession calling my name. That felt like a decent reason when I applied. In rooms full of people who have wanted a specific legal career since childhood, it can feel unserious. There is also a practical fear underneath it. My family hears “law” and hears security. I hear a large number of possible routes, several languages I do not fully command, internships I may need to finance, and the possibility that I will graduate still unable to answer the question. At the same time, I do not regret choosing it. I like learning why systems are built the way they are and who gets protected by them. I like that a tutorial can move from a technical rule to a moral argument in ten minutes. I like hearing how the same issue looks completely different to people who grew up elsewhere. Maybe the problem is not that I lack a plan. Maybe I am expecting a degree I have barely started to provide a finished identity. So my current answer is: I do not know what kind of lawyer I want to be, or whether lawyer is the destination. I am trying to learn enough to ask a better question.

People speak about moving abroad for university as if it is one clean emotion: exciting. I am excited. I have wanted this for a long time. I chose Maastricht because I wanted a wider education and a life that did not feel decided before it began. But leaving is not just walking toward something. It is also walking away from a version of daily life that held me without asking. At home I knew which shop would still be open, what every sound in the kitchen meant, and how long it took a friend to arrive. I did not have to translate my humour or explain why a certain meal mattered. My family could annoy me in person instead of lovingly asking for updates through a screen. There is guilt too. The money required for this move is not abstract. I know what my family is postponing and how carefully they avoid making me feel responsible for it. When they say they are proud, I hear the trust underneath. On difficult days, that trust can become pressure: I must be happy enough, successful enough, and grateful enough to justify everybody’s effort. Some friends at home talk about my move as escape. In a way it is. There were opportunities I could not see for myself there. But calling it escape makes the people and the place sound like something I am happy to leave behind. I am not. I can want more options and still love what made me. Then there is the strange difference between being international as a fact and as a personality. Before arriving, international sounded open and interesting. In practice it can mean being the person who does not know the system, cannot make the right small talk, or needs an extra second to understand. It means building competence again from the beginning. I am writing this because I keep seeing two stories: the student who is having the best time of their life, and the student who wants to go home. I do not fit either. I can have a great afternoon, call my family in tears that night, and still wake up wanting to stay. Maybe becoming independent is not proving that you no longer need anyone. Maybe it is learning how to carry the people you need into a life they cannot organise for you.

Every object asked a question. Will I still wear this? Will I have time to read that? Am I the kind of person who needs three formal outfits? Does bringing food from home mean I am practical or afraid? I packed for several imaginary versions of student life and forgot obvious things the real version needed. The useful items were not always practical. One book, a familiar mug, and something that smelled like home did more for the first week than the clothes chosen for events that never existed.

Before moving in, we discussed cleaning, guests, noise and shared costs like calm adults. Then actual life started. One person cooks at midnight. One person needs silence to study. One person believes a pan is soaking until history ends. Everybody has a different point at which an empty toilet roll becomes someone’s responsibility. The surprising part is not the conflict. It is how quickly strangers learn the vulnerable details of each other’s routines. We know who calls home after a bad day, who skips dinner when stressed, and who cleans the kitchen because they need to feel in control. Living together has not made us best friends. It has made us witnesses. I think that deserves a little more patience than the chore schedule can express.

I liked the group chat. I also muted it. There were constant jokes, plans, debates, and messages that seemed to require context I had missed. Every time I returned, the group looked closer. I felt pressure to catch up so I would not arrive as a stranger. Muting it helped me understand that reading everything was not the same as building relationships. I kept the practical notifications and let the rest pass. When we met in person, nobody tested my knowledge of the chat. Some of the people I connected with had been quiet too. The entire social future had not actually happened on my phone.

My relationship did not suddenly become bad when I moved. That almost made long distance harder to explain. We still cared about each other. We still wanted to share our days. But our days stopped fitting together. A spontaneous conversation became “can you call after your class but before I go out?” If one of us was tired, the other had already spent hours waiting for that small window. I also felt guilty whenever I was having fun. If I stayed at an event, I was choosing a new life over our call. If I went home early, I quietly resented a relationship that had not actually asked me to leave. We tried not to keep score, but distance turns time into something visible. The strangest part was explaining new people. Every name needed context. Every story began with a map of who was there. Meanwhile, the person who used to understand my life automatically was slowly receiving summaries. We are still figuring it out. I do not have advice. I only wish people talked about long distance as more than loyalty versus betrayal. Sometimes two people are doing their best and the practical shape of their lives still hurts.

I call my family with genuine questions about their lives. Within two minutes I ask to see the pet. They turn the camera. The pet looks uninterested. I make several embarrassing sounds. For a moment the distance between countries becomes a small rectangle containing an animal who has already adjusted to my absence. It is funny, but it is also the safest kind of homesickness. I can say I miss the pet without making my parents worry that I regret leaving. Everybody understands the joke and nobody has to solve anything.

We broke up before I moved because we thought it would be kinder than slowly becoming a problem in each other’s new lives. It was a calm decision. No betrayal, no dramatic final scene, no person to blame. We looked at the distance, the schedules, the money, and the people we were likely to become. We said we wanted each other to arrive freely. Very mature. Extremely reasonable. Then I discovered that a reasonable breakup still enters the room with you. While everyone talked about who they might meet at university, I was quietly deleting routines. I stopped sending photos to the first person I would normally send them to. Good news felt incomplete because the person who knew how long I had wanted this was no longer part of the arrival. Bad days were worse because calling would mean reopening something we had deliberately closed. I did not want to tell new people too early. I was afraid of becoming the person whose main fact is a breakup. So I acted fully excited, which I was, and fully available for a new chapter, which I was not. It is getting easier. The city has memories now that do not belong to us. I am not waiting for a reunion or writing this as a message to them. I only want to say that starting over can include mourning something good. You do not have to turn the old relationship into a mistake to make room for what comes next.

I am genuinely looking forward to meeting people. I am also already overwhelmed by the schedule. Every event seems to be described as essential. If you leave early, you missed the best part. If you skip one, that was apparently the event where everybody became close. By the third day I was no longer choosing what sounded fun; I was trying to prevent future regret. I know introduction is temporary and people want to make the most of it. I just wonder whether we could talk more honestly about the people who go home early, arrive later, do not drink, have health limitations, need to work, or simply cannot be socially available for a full week. Did anyone find that friendships continued forming after the official beginning? I think many of us know the answer is yes, but it would help to hear the actual stories.

People say to avoid offers that seem too good to be true. The problem is that after weeks of searching, my idea of “too good” became any person replying. A room without a viewing can be a scam, but international students cannot always travel for viewings. A landlord asking for documents can be normal, but the documents contain exactly the information you should protect. Being asked to pay quickly is suspicious, but real rooms also disappear quickly. Every warning has an exception and every exception is expensive. I nearly continued with an offer because I wanted it to be real. The photos looked ordinary. The explanation was believable. What stopped me was not expertise; it was a friend saying the pressure felt wrong. We should keep sharing scam warnings, but we should also be honest that the housing system creates ideal conditions for them. Desperate students are not stupid students.

At university, exam week is treated as an exceptional period. At work, it is still a week when people need shifts covered. I asked for fewer hours and felt guilty. Then a colleague became unavailable, and I accepted more than I had planned. Every individual decision looked manageable. Together they produced a version of me studying from morning until work and returning too tired to remember what I had read. The lesson was not better productivity. It was that I need to disappoint somebody earlier. A manager, a group member, or the part of myself that thinks every request is proof of reliability. Work is not an extracurricular activity for me. Neither is university. Balancing them means admitting that both cannot receive the best version of me every week.

We knew the move would change the relationship. For weeks we discussed distance as if enough planning could remove emotion. Eventually we ended it. Then I had to continue comparing rooms, uploading documents, and deciding what to pack. Grief existed beside extremely boring tasks. People expected the move to distract me. Sometimes it did. Sometimes every new experience made me want to tell the person who was no longer the first person I could tell. I am not writing this to reopen anything. I am writing it because new beginnings are often shown as clean. Mine contained a closed relationship, an open suitcase, and the knowledge that the right decision can still make the future feel worse before it feels better.

Studying psychology gives me names for things. I can recognise avoidance, comparison, stress responses, unhelpful patterns, and the gap between what somebody feels and what the evidence supports. This knowledge is useful. It is not a remote control. When I feel overwhelmed, part of my brain starts writing an academic commentary on the overwhelmed part. I know that the group chat is making comparison worse. I know sleep would help. I know one bad result does not predict my future. I can explain all of this and still refresh, stay awake, and imagine the future collapsing. Sometimes psychological knowledge adds embarrassment. If I understand the pattern, why am I repeating it? If I would tell a friend to rest, why can I not rest? The subject can make ordinary difficulty feel like failure to apply the material. Other people contribute to this expectation. They assume psychology students are emotionally skilled, good at relationships, calm in conflict, and able to detect every unhealthy situation early. We are studying people while continuing to be people. The coursework does not remove history, insecurity, or the desire to make a bad decision because it feels good for one evening. I have also seen students use terminology as distance. Calling a person avoidant can be easier than saying their behaviour hurt. Analysing a family dynamic can be safer than admitting we still want approval. Concepts can clarify experience, but they can also protect us from actually feeling it. The healthiest change for me has been using less language sometimes. I am tired. I am lonely. I am jealous. I need help. These statements are not sophisticated and do not need a theoretical framework before they are allowed. Psychology has made me more curious about why people behave as they do. I hope it also makes me slower to turn every behaviour into a diagnosis. Understanding is valuable. It is not the same as immunity, and it does not create an obligation to manage every feeling perfectly.