Whenever I see sustainability initiatives around our university, it makes me wonder: Is this actually doing something? We replaced garbage bins with recycling stations. We got rid of plastic cups from our coffee machines. We implemented Warm Sweater Days by lowering the temperature of our buildings by 1°C. I see these measures and think, well surely, this is better than doing nothing? From a more macro-perspective, our university has a devoted team on sustainability that is driving Maastricht towards becoming a ‘sustainable university’ by 2030. Well, good for us! Keep up the good work Maastricht!

I recently gave up drinking, so when I saw the Observant report last week about the Wageningen research claiming that drinking alcohol-free beer is “just as much fun” as imbibing normal beer, I was intrigued (and quite sceptical). The research in question conducted fMRI scans on 21 drinkers and concluded that so long as the participants thought that they were drinking regular beer, drinking alcohol-free beer had the same pleasure activation in the brain as downing regular beer. In other words, we can trick people into activating certain pleasure sensations in their brains.

Albert Mhangami has an infectious, radiating smile. Yet, as a black student living in Maastricht, he is regularly confronted by racism. For example, once as he was cycling home, a group of drunks threw apples at him, calling him a nigger. As his teacher (and as a human being), I am infuriated, but as a minority living in Maastricht myself, I am not very surprised.

“If you’re going to try, go all the way,” Bukowski once wrote. Do so even if it means you alienate yourself from loved ones, lose your mind, and end up in jail because going all the way is “the only good fight there is.”

An old Army buddy of mine once joked that procrastination is like masturbation, it feels good until you realize you just screwed yourself. Rather than postponing things, just get it done. Action – as he would say – is the best cure for anxiety. But then there are those that believe that if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute. Waiting until the night of the deadline, panicking about it, and throwing something together right at the end can – at times – yield surprisingly adequate results. In reality though, the former option is not always feasible and the latter is not necessarily ideal.

Whenever I draft recommendation letters and offer career advice to students asking for them, I am confronted by a sense of unease. This feeling emerges from the fact that as students prepare for the next stage of their lives (and the uncertainty that comes with it), too many of them fall into the trap of assessing their employability and self-worth by overemphasizing one factor above others: their grades.

“I think about suicide every day.” So read an anonymous post on Spotted: Maastricht University, a popular Facebook group among the students. Unfortunately, posts like this are not uncommon as many students struggle with emotional and psychological issues while studying in Maastricht; and in my humble opinion, there is an alarming lack of institutional support to help these students in need.