Hello, Guten Tag and goede dag to whom it may concern,

We want to welcome you on our blog.  This little blog is intended to serve as a source for persons that are interested in us and what the Foreign Exchange Program at Washburn Law is about. Be it our friends and families back home in Europe, people from Washburn Law and Topeka and especially other students interested in doing an exchange in the USA.

In order to start our blog we would like to share our first impressions of Kansas with you. We arrived here shortly after a blizzard swept through Topeka and covered the whole city inn white. Also the temperature was everything else but comfortable. Not the best first impression but hey – the people from Topeka did not choose it for us.
The first slump was quickly straightened out when we saw our big and highly relaxed apartment really close to the University Campus.

But more important were all the new and interesting people we met in the first month of our stay. Inter alia have we met State Secretary of Agriculture Swaty, we had the pleasure to shake hands with State Governor Parkinson and we had the opportunity to sit on the Supreme Court bench while talking to Judge Johnson. But not to forget all the nice and helpful professors and fellow students that helped us a lot getting started and threw great welcome parties and cooked the finest dinners for us (thanks ILS for the super party and thank you Professor Maxwell and Terry for the awesome cheese fondue and the warm welcome dinner in the American BBQ Restaurant).

Besides being fulltime student we did not lose out on having fun times. We went to the Lawrence Fieldhouse to see a KU college basketball game (and we’ll go there again – Nebraska you’ll lose!!!), we tried a couple of really delicious food places which serve local beer and typical American delicacies and of course we also went to some of the local bars.

To reciprocate a bit for all the start-up help we invited our biggest supporters over to our apartment in order to have an interactive sushi dinner/workshop. It was a great night and it turned out that it is seriously possible to buy good and fresh fish in Topeka / Kansas. We had a lot of fun rolling our makis and trying out all kind of different ingredients and flavors.

On behalf of the Effies,

Sven and Dave

On January 5, 2010, the first group of foreign exchange from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, David, Sahra, Sven, and Thomas, arrived at Kansas City International Airport, to begin their semester abroad at Washburn Law.  Being a new student group, Washburn had to assign the students an identifying student status.  It was decided the Maastricht students would have the designation of “FE” for “foreign exchange” student.  Sahra quckly adopted the “handle” referring to themselves as the “Effies” and Sven and David, not to be outdone, flashed the hand symbol of an “F” and an backward “E” as their “sign”.  All of Washburn Law is pleased to welcome our creative and energetic new group of law students–the Spring 2010 “Effies”!

Washburn University School of Law is pleased to host four law students from the Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Sven, David, Thomas, and Sahra are taking a full load of law school classes during the Spring 2010 semester. All are taking Criminal Law and Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing for Foreign Exchange Students. Other law classes being taken by the students include Law and Human Rights, Law in Literature, Business Associations, Taxation of Individual Income, or Mediation. During June and July the students will be placed in various extern/internship opportunities.