Summer school

Tilburg University Summer School (TUSS) was established in 2009, offering short, intensive courses ‒ taking no more than four weeks ‒ to national and international students, mainly Bachelor’s students. Initially, these were mostly language courses, soon followed by theme-based courses provided by the Tilburg Schools. The Summer School is a kind of corporate branding exercise, but its courses also aim to facilitate TUSS student transfer into regular degree programs, and they fit into exchange programs with partner universities abroad. Between 175 and 275 students annually take part, and more than half of these are international students. Some of these take advantage of TUSS to prepare themselves for the academic year. TUSS courses have three components: theory (education and research), knowledge application and social relevance. Topics are often related to the University’s impact or valorization programs: Generating Value from Data; Active Ageing; Well-Being and Health; and Empowering the Resilient Society.Students are presented with an elaborate social program, with the I*ESN student association and regular students assisting in evening and weekend activities. Trips often include visits to a Trappist monastery, but parties are also a regular feature on the agenda.

A history

TUSS is not the only summer school in the University’s history. When the University Library was opened in 1992, hundreds of requests from librarians came pouring in from all over the world, yearning to see for themselves the feat that had been accomplished in Tilburg. In the four years after it was launched, the library concept attracted well over 9,000 visitors from 33 countries, including Australia, Bolivia, Russia and South-Africa. To be able to meet the demand for guided tours, knowledge transfers and consultancies, a special business unit was fitted out: the Tilburg Innovation Center for Electronic Resources (TICER). TICER built a name for itself with summer schools for librarians, highlighting the roles of librarians in the new libraries, and stressing the importance of strategy, digital trends, copyrights and licenses. Though the UB was way ahead of its time in 1992, its vanguard position simply could not last forever, and the phenomenon came to an end in 2013.