Students of Groningen: ‘Decided to study art’

‘I struggled a lot when I quit engineering. I always had this vision of myself of being a successful kind of person and when I quit that career, I also stopped following the road that I had planned for myself since I was a child. I was the smart one and I suddenly left that behind. I felt a bit disappointed in myself. I liked the intellectual challenge of studying engineering because it is difficult. But I felt that I didn’t belong there. It was not my kind of world. I wanted to be creative. It was design engineering, but still not creative. It was very technical and very focused on productivity, money and efficiency and that just doesn’t suit me. The idea of studying something with arts entered my head more and more. But it is difficult to throw yourself out there and choose a more unsafe road than engineering. It took me a long time to know what I wanted: I decided to study at the art Academie Minerva Groningen. I am 25 now and I started doing engineering when I was 18. But now I am on my way to finding what I want and what makes me happy so I can be relaxed.’