Post Study Visa for students in Belgium

I have been doing some research on Post Study Visa for students in various countries in order to understand it better because Belgium does not have any unfortunately. US, UK, France, Netherlands, Australia etc provide 1-2 years of "Post Study Visa" to all Masters students with varying degree of flexibility.

To my surprise this thought never crossed school's mind even when the school is pushing so hard for internalization.I am trying to speak to the school management and the alumni association to highlight and push this issue further. One of the reasons I see for this issue is the relatively small number of foreign students(non-EEA) in Belgium.

Negotiations - a different perspective

This has been due for a long time. We had an amazing course on 'Negotiations Skills' by our Program Director, Dr David Venter. Dr Venter was one of the twelve negotiators in South Africa to facilitate the transfer of power from Apatheid regime to democracy.

Before this course, I never thought that 'Negotiation' is like an art that could be mastered by practice. Dr Venter is an amazing speaker and with his real life examples he made the course very interesting and engaging.

Key learnings from the course:-

- Before the negotiation, do a through home-work on the problems at hand, other party(ies) involved and your own bucket of options.

- Enter the negotiation with your 'Aspiration Base'(Where to start the negotiation), 'Real Base'( upto what point can you go in negotiation) and 'BATNA'

- Make the first move.

- Approach it with the idea 'Win-more' 'Win-more' .

We practised many simulated 'Negotiation' problems and it was really possible to apply the above learnings in practice.

Cacophony in the breaks...

Normally a lot of non-Belgian classmates including myself make VoIP calls to people back home or else where in the breaks of the classes.The other day during a break I was sitting in the class working on something and I realised there was a virtual cacophony of languages in the class auditorium,which I had never noticed before. Somebody was speaking Spanish,somebody Russian, somebody Bengali and faintly I could hear some Greek too.

It was quite a change from all in English discussion to a cacophony of langauages :) Internationalism at its best!!!!!