Boost your academic life
Are you searching for a minor, a way to fill in your free electives, a placement, or do you want to enrich your academic knowledge and learn more about BUas? If so, please consider exploring the opportunities of expertise areas and professorships.
In this article you will learn about what expertise areas and professorships there are, what the difference is between them, how to join one and what the benefits are of joining one. To get a real-time view of the topic, I interviewed Paul van de Coevering. Paul is head of the professorship of Urban Intelligence at BUas/ABEL (Academy of Built Environment & Logistics).
Focusing on teaching exclusively until about 20 years ago, universities of applied sciences have since gradually been expanding their scope towards practice-oriented research, , or applied research. This research is divided into different focus areas. These focus areas are called expertise areas and the expertise areas with a professor leading the research efforts are called professorships.
These research projects are done to develop knowledge, which will go to the industry for the improvement of policy practice, but also to the students to improve their education. Students get lectures about current topics and research projects, which makes their classes more interesting.
Before writing this article I (and a lot of my fellow students) did not know much about the research that is done at eniversities of applied sciences, but did know about research done at universities. I asked Paul what the difference is between them:
“We (BUas) are focused more on the practical implications of how we can improve things in society, we want to get things done: change policy processes, change how we build cities, et cetera. And of course we sometimes also publish articles about our research and research results. In a university it’s more or less the other way around. It’s much more based on research, where they also link to society for the valorisation of that knowledge. It’s a matter of priorities.”
“The funny thing is that these two worlds are coming together a little bit. Because the universities of applied sciences are continuously developing more solid and more academic research, and the traditional universities are also increasing their connection with the industry. It’s an interesting world to be in.” (Coevering, 2020).
Students have multiple ways of connecting with the research done by expertise areas and professorships. As stated earlier, students get lectures about the executed research and current topics, but students themselves can also join these research initiatives. This can be done towards completion of their free electives (2nd year), placements, minors (3rd year) and graduation projects (4th year).
When I asked Paul why students should consider joining expertise areas and professorships he stated that: “you get introduced to state-of-the-art knowledge. There is a very big network of interesting parties and people in the industry that are also keen on getting innovations done and implemented. It’s mainly that you are really working on innovations and key research that is trying to change the status quo we have in society. That’s the difference between participating in a professorship and expertise area, and working at a firm in the field. They can also be innovative, but mostly they are also constrained by the framework they are working in. We have more of an innovation and development role. That’s a big difference.” (Coevering, 2020).
Not only at ABEL there are expertise areas and professorships, also at all the other academies at BUas. A lot of the time, these different departments are actually working together. For example with Tourism and Mobility. “Tourism involves a lot of traffic flows, and it also involves getting people through cities in a smart way. These are all topics where there are interactions.”(Coevering, 2020).
If you want to know more about the different kinds of research, the outcomes or the people working on research at BUas, you can go to the website https://pure.buas.nl/en/. Here you can find all the information you need to learn more about research done at BUas, and maybe eventually join one yourself.
Sources
What is a professorship? (n.d.). Retrieved from fau.eu: fau.eu
Coevering, P. v. (2020, November 27). (L. v. Egdom, Interviewer)
BUas Research Portal. (n.d.). Retrieved from pure.buas.nl: pure.buas.nl
