The Winding Road to Eindhoven
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In just about a few weeks, I will be able to commemorate - if I want - my 5th anniversary in The Netherlands. The Netherlands: the country where I came to study, and where I decided to continue my life. But how did I end up here?
There is something special about the number 5. I don’t think it is inherently an interesting number on its own, but when it relates to dates, or more specifically, years, it always feels like a milestone. Not just 5, but all of its multiples.
For me, being now 25, five years is 20% of my whole life, and around 70% of my adult life. Having lived more than 70% of my adult life in a foreign country, one starts asking when does abroad stop being abroad. The answer is not always clear, but I do consider the Netherlands to be my “home”.
I think it’s a common feeling among immigrants to not feel 100% associated with a single place. Since moving here, I’ve tried to adapt; I learned the language, I speak the language, I conduct my life in Dutch. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were to move back to Portugal. I think I’d feel too Dutch for Portugal, and yet too Portuguese for the Netherlands.
Either way, the thought that brought me here today was: how did I end up here? In Eindhoven of all places. Now, that’s not a very long story, but I think it’s important to remember that Eindhoven was far from my first choice.
Everything started when I was in secondary school - for some of you, that’d be high school. I was around 14 or 15, and I started thinking a bit more about my future. I lived in a small town then, and I knew I wanted to study Computer Science. So I had to choose where.
There are quite a lot of places in Portugal, but I had already made a list of universities abroad where I’d wish to study. Yes, for my bachelor’s, not even for my master’s. I dreamt about it, I watched YouTubers; it was something that I really felt like I would want to do. I think that, at the time, the choices were mostly in the UK.
I’m not sure why, but there is - was - this sentiment in Portugal about studying and living in the UK. It was almost everyone’s dream. It was so big that there is - was - a company whose only purpose was helping new students move to the UK and find a university there. After Brexit, they started focusing on other destinations too.
Anyway, the idea to study abroad was always on my mind. I ended up not doing it for my bachelor’s, and I’m grateful for it. All the growing and great times I had in Lisbon are irreplaceable for me. For the first two years in Lisbon, I mostly forgot the idea of studying abroad, until I got reminded about it by someone at work.
I am, to this day, still grateful for the reminder. I, of course, started making a new list of universities, which I managed to resurrect from my Notion. The UK was still swinging in full force on my list, but I had some others:
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Southampton, Bristol, Birmingham, and Edinburgh
- 🇩🇰 Denmark: Aarhus and Copenhagen
- 🇫🇮 Finland: Helsinki and Aalto
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland: EPFL and ETH
- 🇳🇱 The Netherlands: TU Delft and TU Eindhoven
As you can see, I tried to avoid some top-tier ones, like Cambridge and Oxford, but I still wanted to try ETH Zürich and Edinburgh. I remember vaguely looking at the USA, but it’s just too expensive and I never thought it’d be worth it.
After making this list, I started looking at the requirements and how the application processes worked. I don’t know why or how or who, but I completely ditched Denmark and Finland. In the UK, I settled on Southampton and Edinburgh, almost the two ends of the country. I proceeded to apply to the remaining universities.
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Southampton and Edinburgh
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland: EPFL and ETH
- 🇳🇱 The Netherlands: TU Delft and TU Eindhoven
The applications were mostly straightforward. For the UK and The Netherlands, I could just submit everything online. For Switzerland, I also needed to mail physical documents, with official translations and all of those shenanigans. I also needed to get recommendation letters and write a motivation letter. Those were things I had never done before, since that’s not how it works in Portugal. However, it wasn’t a deal breaker.
From the get-go, I did not expect the Swiss universities to accept me, so it was not a surprise when it happened. They were too renowned and they had extremely high entrance requirements. Portugal uses a linear grading system and my GPA was around 16-point-something out of 20 (80%), but that wasn’t enough.
What annoyed me about it was that the effort to apply to these universities did not match, in any way, the reward. I had to mail so many documents, pay for so many translations, even from my high school grades. How’s that relevant for a master’s application? Anyway, they rejected me with a physical letter, which is still stored somewhere at my parents’ house.
In the UK, I got a conditional offer from the University of Southampton: as long as I kept my grades where they were, I’d be able to enroll. The same thing happened with TU Eindhoven. So at that moment, I already had two conditional offers, which I expected to meet.
I don’t exactly remember if I ever ended up applying to TU Delft or not. They either required or highly recommended an additional exam, which is extremely uncommon within the EU. And I had just done my IELTS and was extremely busy with the last year of my bachelor’s; I was not in the mood to go do another exam about comprehension, mathematics, and logic.
Fast forward not so long, I decided on the Netherlands. I’m not exactly sure why. I think it was a mix of Brexit, the UK university being much more expensive - despite still being cheaper for EU students at the time - and maybe just Southampton in general. With that decision in front of me, I canceled my ongoing application to Edinburgh and just focused on finishing my school year and later moving to the Netherlands.
Fast forward almost five years, I’m still in The Netherlands. I do not regret the decision. I still wonder how my life would’ve been if I had decided to go to the UK. Would I have come back to Portugal? Would Edinburgh have accepted me if I had waited a bit longer? Who knows. So many questions, so few answers.
I can now call the Netherlands my home, and I’m happy with that. I still think I would like to try living in other places in the Netherlands before actually settling down somewhere. Who knows what the future holds?