Director's Message

I supervised my first URECA project in my second year at the university in 2006. That year URECA was also pretty new to the university, with the very first URECA projects taking place in 2004. These days, like me, URECA is a bit older. This year URECA celebrates 20 years! 20 amazing years.

 

I love URECA projects for many reasons. One big reason is that in comparison with more high-pressure contexts like final year projects, with URECA, the emphasis is always on curiosity, fun, and an encounter with a new way of learning. As we like to emphasize in the programme, the ‘E’ in URECA stands for ‘Experience’. URECA is a flexible framework, and URECA projects can look like many different things. This is the strength of the programme.

 

I also love to meet and work with URECA students. For many of these students URECA is their first encounter with research and collaborative exploration. The joy and excitement we feel from these scholars reminds us why we are in this game in the first place.

 

Research is a critical experience in the development of a student. When a student starts doing research, they learn that academic disciplines are not isolated edifices, set in stone in some distant past, but that knowledge is fluid and is constantly refreshed and applied anew from different points of view. They learn that the most interesting ideas often lie on the boundaries between disciplines. That knowledge is not something to be acquired solely for exams but becomes part of our being and how we interact with the world.

 

I wish all our scholars and supervisors a rewarding and fun research experience!