The idea behind this project
In 2017 UCM will celebrate its 15th birthday with a festive event, while Maastricht University celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2016. A young university with even younger faculties. We were wondering why the second Liberal Arts college was founded in Maastricht and only found a small amount about UCM's history on the official websites. Even the wikipedia pages in Dutch, English, or German, offered dissappointingly little information.
This research project, therefore, collects information about UCM's founding and its organisational history via interviews. We were lucky that all former deans, most of the original staff, and some alumni students, are still around in Maastricht to be interviewed. However, we did not want to hide away our findings in an academic paper, which is potentially hard to find and has a limited audience. The goal of this project should be inform anyone, who would like to learn more about UCM. Alumni, current students, prospective students, parents, staff members, and anyone who finds his or her way to this website.
A website provides the ideal platform to distribute our findings, but we aimed to make it even more accessible by presenting our text in the form of a short story. Our believe is that a text, which is focussed on a narrative instead of a descriptive history, can do UCM's history justice.
What is a UCM Research Project?
Every first year student at UCM starts their second semester at UCM with the skills courses "Research Methods I and II", which provide a prepartion for the "Research Project" in the final period of the first year. It is usually conducted by a group of three and students are free to choice a topic to pursue during period 6.
Check out the full research paper here
This short story is accompanied by a research report, which outlines our methodology and provides more detail on the process behind "The Infinite Student". You can download the paper here. Note: The paper may sometimes reference the transcripts of the interviews. The full transcripts are not publicly available due to privacy reasons and have been omitted from the download version. However, the full transcripts are available at request at hello@theinfinitestudent.nl