 Dear student, welcome to Tilburg University. You're about to enter a new phase in your life. Your student days. It's a phase in which you will acquire a lot of knowledge and skills. But it is also a period in which you will begin to discover who you are, what you consider important, and what you are good at. You will also learn how to apply your knowledge and skills in practice so that you can help advance the world you are part of. Your student days are a period in which you develop yourself further to eventually become a young professional with knowledge, skills, and character. In your life as a student, you will experience a lot of freedom. What is most important is to choose the route that fits you best. Thus, you can choose to spend some time studying abroad, decide to do a traineeship, get an interesting job on the side, or become an active member of an association that appeals to you. Having to make all these choices may seem like a daunting challenge, but Tilburg University offers you support in many ways and helps you map out your own route to success. In your first year, for instance, you're assigned a mentor that helps you get off to a good start and helps you make the transition from secondary school to professional education to university as smoothly as possible. If you have any questions, you can consult your academic counselor. If you want to find out what you are good at, you can take the talent management course. If you feel it's all getting a bit too much, or if you feel things are getting out of balance, it may be a good idea to take it easy and put things on hold for a while. You might want to take a mindfulness course. Besides all this, all students get lectures in philosophy, which help you develop into a critical, independent thinker. It now seems like a long way off, but at the end of your studies, you will have developed into a young professional and you will be able to employ your knowledge, skills, and character to understand and advance society. Choose your own path to success.