Meet the local ESRA Committee

A day in the life of Laura Boeschoten

This time, I am taking you on a day in my life that I am not working, since it is “Good Friday”. This is a holiday and therefore Utrecht University is closed. I will spend today in some places that are in a very short travel distance from Utrecht, so I hope you have some time to visit this as well during your stay!

My morning starts at home, which is close to Amstel station in Amsterdam. Amstel station is in the east side of Amsterdam, only a 20-minute train ride away from Utrecht. As the name suggests, it is very close to the Amstel River. I first bike up to “De Pijp”, a lively neighborhood a bit closer to the center of Amsterdam, to go to a gym class together with friends. After, we walk over the “Albert Cuyp” market, where I buy flowers and get some food. 

The Albert Cuyp Market in Amsterdam

Since the sun came out in the afternoon, I go to the lake in Vinkeveen. Vinkeveen is one of the many small lake villages in between Utrecht and Amsterdam. If it is hot in Utrecht during ESRA and you would like to escape the city, I highly recommend visiting some of the villages in this area. A bus (line number 120) runs from Utrecht Central station to Amsterdam and stops at villages such as Maarssen, Breukelen and Loenen, which have small historic centers and lakes where you can swim or rent boats.

At the Vinkeveense plassen

In the evening, I catch up on some work e-mail from last week. Since I was at GESIS in Cologne for a couple of days to teach a course about Latent Class Analysis, they piled up a bit. These days, I receive a lot of emails from students with questions about the Applied Data Science minor program that I coordinate. In addition, I review some of the updates that have been done on our Port software for Data Donation in the last week. I finish the day with a nice evening walk along the Amstel river.

Walk along the Amstel river