Welcome to the student chapter for the 2025 accreditation of the Computational Science Master's programme! If you ended up on this website, you are probably interested in what studying Computational Science is like for the students. Luckily, we have a lot to share with you on this topic! First, let us briefly explain the purpose of this website and what we aim to achieve.

Purpose

Any degree programme in the Netherlands, needs to be accredited every 6 years. This is a process where an independent committee verifies that the programme meets the necessary standards of a Master's degree. As a part of this process, students are asked to create their own chapter to share their experiences as students of the programme. The student chapter is form-free: it can take the form of an analysis per assessment standard or a separate SWOT analysis, but it can also be a video or the registration of a student meeting. This time we - Tycho, Sofia and Mirjam - were given the opportunity to create the student chapter. Inspired by our predecessors, we opted to build a website where we share our experiences and those of our peers with you. In this way, the chapter can also be used to inform prospective students and function as a time capsule of our time in this wonderful Master's programme.

What is Computational Science?

Computational Science is a field that uses computational models to answer research questions that are otherwise hard to solve. These models are based on theory, data and observations of the real-life systems. They allow us to gain insights into, experiment with, and make predictions about complex systems in the real world. The field relies on mathematics and computer science to build the models, however the applications of these models are vast and diverse. Computational models can be used to answer research questions about financial markets, medical interventions, the weather, crowd management, disease outbreak and much more. This interdisciplinary nature makes it a challenging, but vibrant field to study.

The Master Computational Science

The Master's in Computational Science is a two year degree that teaches students to build and use computational models to answer (research) questions. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, students with various backgrounds are able to enroll, although a basic understanding of mathematics and programming is required. During the programme, students have a lot of freedom in choosing their courses and their preferred specialization, whether this is complex systems, computational finance, high performance computing or something else. On top of that, all students are required to complete a number of core courses that teach them the most important tools every computational scientist should have in their toolbox. Finally, each student applies the knowledge they have gathered during the course of the programme to complete a 42 EC research project needed to graduate.