What is the programme Board?
Before we dive in, a quick explanation of what the Programme Board is. The Programme Board of International Studies is responsible for the teaching programme, i.e. for designing and implementing the teaching programme. The Board comprises of a member of the academic staff as Programme Chair, the Programme Manager, and two students from International Studies, last year this were Mimi and Jitske.

Mimi and Jitske look back
In this past year, we (Mimi and Jitske) have had the chance to let the voices of the students be heard within the decision making process in the Programme Board. We were able to provide the other board members with a student perspective on issues that were raised by them and we were able to draw attention to problems brought forward by the student body.

We look back at our time as student representatives in the Programme Board with a great feeling of gratitude, as we were able to improve the study programme and we learned a lot about the organizational structure of the university itself.

In this past year we have worked on the following:

• Responding to popular demand from the students, we were able to help in the decision making process over the conversion of study abroad grades in the study programme. From now onwards there will be a pass/fail system instead of the grade conversion system that received a lot of pushback from the students. The original grades obtained abroad will also be recorded.
• We reviewed the new enrolment system for electives/thematic seminars and made a joint board decision that this system, set up by our predecessors, is a great success.
• We were able to represent the board and students during the national accreditation process. This is a process all study programmes go through every 6 years. In the last review, several concerns were raised by the visiting accreditation committee. Fortunately, we were able to allay these concerns during the multiple-day visit in May and we passed the review. The accreditation committee was impressed by the popularity and diversity of the programme, praising its multi-disciplinary dimension. The next lighter mid-term review will take place in 2022.
• In response to the incidents surrounding Sinterklaas at campus last year, the Programme Board discussed how to ensure that the programme provides an inclusive environment. It became clear to the Programme Board that not all students feel like their voice is heard and that not all students feel safe to voice their concerns on campus. To address this our chair, Joost Augusteijn, posted an article on the This is International Studies page to explain the programme’s position. In a wider sense, we took the initiative to form a communications platform for programme board student representatives at Campus The Hague. With the help of the assessor of the Faculty of Humanities, this platform shall be established in the fall of 2019. Besides this, there will be a working group formed that will discuss inclusivity at the Campus. Our aim is to include students in this working group to be able to give them a platform to raise their concerns towards this issue.
• Another working group that the student members of the Programme Board participated in was the working group on multidisciplinarity. This working group, consisting of Programme Board members and teaching staff, who came together to identify and formulate the multidisciplinary profile of our programme. For months we have been meeting in smaller groups to put together a document that will be released soon.
• Other issues we dealt with included an attempt to make clear the difference between the programme’s student website containing need-to-know information and the This Is International Studies website for nice-to-know information.
• Lastly we discussed making written exams anonymous for students, to ensure that it was always felt assessment would be fully objective. There was discussion in the Board on this. At present the system is not organised to allow for this, but discussions can be continued.

Mimi Hu, Joost Augusteijn (Programme Chair) , Jitske Louise Veenhoven and Jaap Kamphuis (Programme Manager)