SBE Introduction day for Exchange Students

There are a lot of exchange students at School of Business and Economics every year and in order to present the Faculty of the Maastricht University and to provide people with contact with other exchange students, SBE organizes Introduction Day.

My group, Source: www.facebook.com

As I mentioned in the last article about SBE Master's Introduction Day, I kind of took this introduction day at SBE twice. But I am really glad as each of those two days provided a bit different experience and as a result, I know more and I also had something interesting to do and I met a lot of people. Obviously I made the same mistake twice – I can't find any any pictures of the day, but I definitely took some and there are only a few provided by the University so the description has to be enough.

Introduction day for Exchange students is compulsory – you have to be there to get your Student card and let the UM know that you arrived and also to get all necessary instructions. And you also get a plenty of additional stuff including quite useful student handbook. You can also find it online, but printed version is more handy.

Free Dutch bank account for students – Rabobank

Are you a student and do you need dutch bank account? My experience with the process of getting bank account in Netherlands. What looks like an easy and fast thing can at the and be pretty annoying and long-run deal.

Rabobank, Source: en.wikipedia.org

I have several czech bank accounts, as I am quite sensitive to the services provided by banks. I hoped, that I will not have to create another one, but I had to. Reason was quite simple – I worked for the university at Master's open day. If you are forreign student and you do not have Maestro card, you will not be able to pay with your card in the shops, so you also would like to create a bank account. At Rabobank, there are bank accounts for students totally for free. The only problem – dutch bureaucracy and time horizon of several weeks. In order to be able to have a bank account, you have to have BSN/sofi number (social security number, unique identifier of you in Netherlands). Another complication for most of the foreign people will also be the language – everything is in only Dutch. Including Internetbanking, so be prepare for that. But let it take step by step, how the whole process looks like and what is an alternative to Rabobank.

Registration at municipality in Maastricht

In order to be able to get my bank account at Rabobank and get tax discount I needed to get Dutch social (BSN) number, which requires registration of my stay in Maastricht at local municipality. The meeting was scheduled for today.

Workers, source: my picture

The first strange thing is, that you actually need to make an appointment for that, and it can scheduled minimum 3 weeks after you ask for it. As I was there on the 3^rd of October, I was offered the 24^th, but I had planned my visit in Czech Republic for that date, so we scheduled it for today Monday, 31^st of October, 9 a.m.

As I missed the green light at the traffic light near my place, I wanted to use the way around as usually so I could save time, but there is some construction work on the street. So I wanted to ride with my bike over the footpath for about 2 meters, and there was a fence on the road. An old nervous guy stopped me, that this ia a place for pedestrians and forced me to get of my bike for these 2 meters. I was really pissed off, because I was in a hurry, you cannot see anyone in a range of a few hundred meters except of these 2 guys, each of them on the other side of the construction (about 20 meters long), forcing people not to ride on bike on the sidewalk. Aahh… This has nothing to do with security as they do not protect anyone, it is only a big waste of money and people get annoyed. But these guys think, how important they are. They also are not pleasant to ask you kindly or reason why. So after this small incident, the rest of my way was ok.