Daan Van De Weem

International tutor of the program, academic year 2022/2023

This year you are the international tutor of the IMM program. Welcome to Lahore Campus! What are your first impressions about the Campus? Have you already had the opportunity to meet the students?

Lahore Campus is a beautiful place. It is very green and large, and I have been here for a few days and I haven’t fully explored but it is very pretty. I’ve already had the opportunity to meet the students! They are also very friendly and excited to let me seethe place. So far, it is a very nice welcome.

What about Lahore City?

I’ve seen very little of the city so far. My host here, which is the person I work with here, has taken me out for dinner yesterday, but I’ve seen the city just from the windows of the car. I think it will take a while to explore the entire city because it looks very large.

What is your role as tutor in the IMM program?

Things do work a little differently here from other universities, and my role here is to make sure that the students are ready for the international professors coming here to teach them and to coordinate situations in which there could be some miscommunications. So at the moment my role is to make sure that the things the teachers expect from the students are met during the courses. It seems very simple, but I am already finding that there are some issues in the communication: for example, the style of the questions and the style of the answers that are asked from the students. So it is my task for now to try to teach them some math topics again, but from a different point of view, in order to prepare the students to the kind of perspective they will have of those topics during the lectures.

So will you be a sort of moderator between students and teachers?

Yes, a mix of a moderator and a coordinator. Actually, I will also give them a lot of problems that their teachers don’t give them, in order to let them exercise in the way they would do in a European university, for instance.

Right. Do you think you will face some cultural barriers in this operation, too?

Of course. In the academic culture there is still a big difference in the styles of the questions that are expected from the students and that is a big problem, because it is very difficult to teach the same things they already know but in a completely different way. And there surely are also some cultural issues. For example, if you give a lecture course, some students would really like to respect the prayer time, which is fair and which is a kind of need the international professors might not know much about; in this situation it is important that I coordinate the communication between them individually. 

How do you think you will try to “break down” these cultural barriers?

So far I have just talked with the students and I have tried to see if there are difficulties in some courses. I will try to give them more problems and to solve them together. Sometimes these exercises will be hard, because I would like to go through their solution with the students and to analyze the way to solve them, to let them be able to reproduce the same patterns in new exercises in class.

Regarding the different style of the answers and the questions expected, is there a more international “style” than the others and will you try to teach students this point of view?

Of course the students already know many things and are very smart and I am not here to say what is the better way. Academia nowadays is governed by western style universities, and especially if you want to apply for western scholarships you have to be ready for the way they look at problems.

So, there are different “methods”.

Yes, and I do not think that the “western” one is better or worse. To me, students here must develop the instruments to enter the international math community more easily, and to contribute to it in their own style and their own way. Even in Europe, there are so many little “barriers” between academic communities which are not England or America, because each of them has its own math history and tradition. That’s why, for instance, in Italy there is a strong tradition in algebraic geometry and other countries have a tradition in other fields of mathematics… and in my opinion, more than breaking down these barriers, the challenge should be to construct a common language but still giving value to the differences and the strengths of each community in the whole picture.

This is very interesting. Thank you for your time.