'The first week is for making friends; the second is for cementing friendships'

Sewing machines whirr as around 20 people sit chatting, drinking coffee and laughing in the ground-floor room of Heidelberglaan 6 during a Sept. 1 repair café hosted by Utrecht University’s Green Office. When familiar faces walk in, some students wave or smile.

The broken items vary: one student comes in with a tote bag; another with her bike; another brings fabric, which she intends to turn into “curtains.” Neele brings a broken belt and two friends, Honor and Bianca, whom she met during the first Welcome Week.

Neele admits with a laugh, though, that fixing her belt is a secondary concern to simply checking out the Green Office, which the group had encountered at Welcome Week’s Aug. 26 association market.

“It's nice, the fact that you spoke to the Green Office last week. Then this week we get to come and try it,” adds Honor.

From left to right: the students Neele, Honor, and Bianca.

This is the first year that Welcome Week, a program meant to introduce international students to Utrecht University and the Netherlands, has hosted a second week of activities. While the initial week, which began Aug. 25, combined recreational and informative events, the second week consisted exclusively of social activities, such as a brewery tour, volleyball tournament, and cooking workshop.

The goal: That students like Neele, Honor and Bianca can turn first-week acquaintances into lasting friends.

“The first week is establishing friendships, but then, [in the second week], you can cement those better,” says Arlo van Roozendaal, Welcome Week project leader.

Student feedback led to the addition, says van Roozendaal. After previous Welcome Weeks, many students indicated they’d like continuous introductory activities throughout the year, à la prior years’ Warm Welcome events, so “it’s not just a Welcome Week and then ‘goodbye.” 

Given that a budget for year-long events no longer exists, van Roozendaal says, the team instead decided to use a class-free week at the start of September to at least extend the program. And between some budget tinkering and higher-than-expected sponsorship revenue, van Roozendaal says, it wasn’t too much of a lift to add a week.

So far, van Roozendaal and Lydia Zangogianni, project assistant for Welcome Week, view the second week’s attendance as “a success.” As of Aug. 28, almost all of the events for the second week were fully booked.

But van Roozendaal says it’s “too early to say” whether the additional week will stick around ; the Welcome Week team will be examining post-event student evaluations throughout September and October to help determine whether it may become permanent.

Students DUB spoke with were broadly appreciative of the second week. Their biggest complaint: That many second-week events were quickly fully booked.

“The time slots were booked out really fast compared to the number of students we are,” says Bianca.

First-year Literary Studies student Artem, speaking with DUB after an eight-kilometre introductory run with Utrecht Running Project, had a similar experience: “Once I looked at events from the second week, most of the ones I wanted to join were already full. It would be nice to have either more variety or more space.”

But, at the very least, “the run was fun.”

DUB was one of the organisations interacting with students at the Get Settled Lab, held during the first week of the 2026 Welcome Week. Our editors asked new international students to guess the meaning of useful Dutch words for a prize. We also asked them about their first impressions of the Dutch language and whether they plan to learn it. Click here to watch the video.