Humans of Honours – Lily Victoria

Lily is a 20 year old Swiss/Swedish student of media and culture and a first year student at the HHP.

What do you study?

I study media and culture. Well, I’ve always had very broad interests, so I’ve always been interested in a variety of different fields and I could never really figure out how to connect those. But the media and culture program here at Utrecht allows me to approach things from an interdisciplinary perspective and allows me to compare media (we’re talking about film, theater and digital media). We’re also allowed to specialize, but while still being able to compare these different forms which seemed like the perfect solution.

Is this also why you choose Honors, because it is more interdisciplinary?

Definitely, I also wanted to study literature at one point and I just love reading in general and love learning about different fields so I’m really excited to get to work with other people during the honours research seminar. None of that yet though.

Is there something that you’re excited to learn more about?

Well, I’m taking an elective on gender studies and postcolonial critique right now and I think that learning more on these topics and gaining a new analytical tool to apply to my field of media is super interesting. Especially because it’s not necessarily something that we would have looked at in our program. In general, I am interested in seeing what other people have been studying and trying to apply that to my own field.

For example, one of my friends is taking a course called banned books right now and that’s also super interesting to me because censorship is also a huge thing in media studies, so I think it’s really cool to be able to combine these.

I’ve also always really been politically active and that’s really important to me too. Not only just to be interested in and active, but also to be educated on topics. So, to me, a part of academia is very much how relevant it is in my own life and what I can learn in order to kind of change my mind or at least think critically about topics in daily life.

Is there anything else you’re interested in that is not at all academic?

I make music. I used to want to be a rock star. But that’s a tough path to go down so I don’t know, maybe in the future I will be able to combine that somehow with my academic studies, but right now it’s just a hobby.

What’s it like where you’re from and how is that different from the Netherlands?

This connects to why I wanted to come to the Netherlands because I wanted to leave Switzerland. I’m not genetically Swiss, but I was born and raised in Switzerland and it tends to be a little outdated when it comes to contemporary fields of studies at the universities. Switzerland has a lot more to offer when it comes to systems like the Hogeschool (school of applied science), but that is education that isn’t necessarily university level. I knew that I wanted to study something that feels more relevant to me, which is also why I’m specializing in critical data because that looks at digital media objects and data flows in our society and there really isn’t anything like that in Switzerland. I’m also very excited to be in an environment that thinks in this contemporary way because Switzerland still has a very traditional view on their research methods, and it’s all very heavily based around natural sciences. So for that reason I’m very excited to be in the Netherlands.

I was not originally going to study in the Netherlands, I should have gone to the UK but I postponed my enrollment to university for a year. Which turned out to be a great thing because of COVID, but then Brexit happened. So I ended up picking another country for which I knew English was an OK option. When settling on the Netherlands I was looking between Amsterdam and Utrecht, and Utrecht just gave me a very cozy academia vibe that I really liked.