 The research master and PhD program combined is a five-year program that prepares students for an academic research career in economics. The research master is two years. This is essentially coursework and ends with writing a research master thesis. Then the PhD phase is three years and in that period students do research and write their PhD thesis. The structure of the research master in the first year are the fundamental courses of economics like microeconomics and macroeconomics etc. The second year is more about choose your fields, choose the optional subjects which interest you the most. Second year it's a very different style of teaching because then you often have take-home exams or just oral interviews. In many cases you collaborate with your friends on solving assignments because then you have to actually have to discuss with each other, come up with new research ideas and present a small two-page research idea. During the research master phase students are provided with several facilities like a shared office, access to printing facilities, access to all economic journals that matter through the library. The facilities here are really nice. We have two excellent labs. So what we do in the virtual reality lab is we run experiments, psychological and economic experiments in which we use virtual reality, which is something that has not been used before, which is a very new feature. And we're one of the first universities in Europe or in the Netherlands that actually has this technology. During the PhD phase they are employees of the university. They get a salary, they have all the facilities that the other employees have. They also have tasks, particularly they are asked to teach usually tutorials or lectures to undergraduates. One of the biggest perks of being a PhD is that we are not a student here, we are an employee. So we are on almost equal footing with the other faculty members as opposed to other schools. We get a salary and not a scholarship. And we have our office space is much more convenient because it's just mostly two people in one office space where you can work really well around your personal space, not be bothered with people coming in or around. And secondly, they also give you adequate exposure to teaching. Often you are involved in setting up exams, creating assignments and also maybe even possibly taking some guest lectures during the actual lectures. The program in Tilburg is modeled after the best graduate programs in economics in the United States. So it prepares students in a very similar way, but it's a small scale program. We are not one of these huge universities with 50,000 students and the advantage of that is that every student can get individual mentoring and attention. There's a really nice research climate here, both in the research master and the courses and in the PhD where the interaction with your professors is really informal. The atmosphere I would say is very collaborative, friendly and a lot of sharing. From all across the world like your people from Europe, Asia, maybe even from South America instance which helps because then it is you're not just not just studying here but you're also making friends and it helps it's a very tight knit community. About half of the students ends up at a university where they combine research and teaching. The other half usually finds a job as a researcher for some national or international organization or firm. I would say it's not an easy program but we learn a lot. As a researcher we are very well prepared for the future career. That's why I'm here.