Student testimonial
Student Jort van Mullingen - BSc Food Technology
Jort van Mulligen is from a small village outside of the city of Zutphen, in the Netherlands. He is a third year BFT student.
There's such a broad range of studies here, I feel like you can always find something that you like
Choosing Food Technology
"I love cooking, baking, and kitchen stuff. Then I heard about food technology and I thought, ‘wow, that’s interesting!’ So I went to the open day at the university. I saw everything about food technology and was like, yeah, this is good. And then I just jumped into it and I never looked back, it was good choice. I like it so much because it's just it feels like all of your answers are coming in as a stream of information. At the start, there were some things that I wanted to know more about cooking and baking. I wanted to know more about how a cake turns brown in the oven? Also how egg whites, when you whip them up, how they turn to a solid mass? Also something about nutrition, but not only about vitamins and stuff. I wanted to know all of that. So that's why I chose this study."
(International) Student Life Experience
"The first two years, I did quite a lot for the food technology study association, Nicolas Appert. I sat on committees and organized stuff, I really like doing that. Since this year, I joined the tennis association. Also, I really like living here instead of studying in a big city. I really like that Wageningen is such a small place and you can go everywhere and you always meet new people. And there's also like a ton of international people that you meet all the time. I like that feel for a student city."
Academic Atmosphere
"I feel like a lot of times it's quite informal and it’s friendly. There's a ton of professors that you call by their first names and you can very easily go up to them and ask them stuff. So it's very open in the sense that you can just go up to these people and ask them anything. I had that with the molecular gastronomy course, which was very much about cooking. After the lecture, I talked to these professors, for I don't know, maybe half an hour. And they were very keen to talk and answer my questions. And then afterwards, I got an email from the professor with a very long list of topics showing different research papers. So it's very much that professors love to talk about their own thing, and they're also very open to answer students questions. It's just also that if you see your professor also outside of university, they're very kind. I really like that atmosphere."
Goals after graduation
"I would love to develop something, like being on an R&D team and then develop products. There's a ton of things that I like doing, so I don't really mind, but I would like to start working somewhere and then see where it goes."
Take home message
"It doesn't get much better than Wageningen because there's just a lot of choice. It's also the broad scope of the courses that make it that you know quite a lot about everything. And yeah, well, why go all over the globe to get something that's this good close to home?!"