Marlen Mertens

Marlen can be rightly called a true ‘international’. For her degree programme, she has travelled to many places around the world and, at every one of them, her results have always been excellent. She appears to be very ambitious, as she started her pitch to the jury with the comment that she wanted to be the president of the entire world. Not because she is power-hungry, but because she would like to change the world for the better. Sustainable development is one of her interests and, in her well-structured pitch, she advocated for the deployment of a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down approach (as president of the world).

Marlen originally comes from Estonia, where she successfully finished secondary school (as a ‘gold medal graduate’) and then took an extra course unit in the Basic Principles of Law at the University of Tartu. This course unit helped her to achieve first place in the Estonian National Supreme Court Competition. Hereafter, she started her Bachelor's degree in Global Responsibility and Leadership in Leeuwarden, which she has been combining with the Honours College programme (an extra 45 ECTS credit points) since her second year. In addition, she is participating in the NAHSS (Netherlands-Asia Honours Summer School) programme, in which she is getting acquainted with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and various banks and companies. Merlen is also taking a one-semester Minor in International Relations at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, taking an online course in Diplomatic Practice at the Jindal Global University, India, and taking part in the summer school Crossroads of the Middle East and Europe in Berlin, Germany. She is also a teaching assistant in Leeuwarden, a student consultant for Huawei in The Hague, and a data analyst intern at Datamaran in Leeuwarden. Furthermore, she is active in all sorts of extra-curricular activities, such as chairing the UCF student association’s debating club and taking part in the applied AI community of the Jantina Tammes School. At the start of this year, she joined the East Africa Programme at Utrecht University and, finally, she will be a project assistant and researcher for a project in Moshi Town, Tanzania.

In brief, Marlen is a truly excellent and internationally oriented student who has everything in her to become a world leader in the area of international development and diplomacy.