As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
In 2008, the collapse of the American property market caused the biggest recession in living memory. This sent a shockwave through the worlds economy that took years to stabilize. I clearly remember learning about this at 8 years old, as my parents, in the real-estate business verged on financial ruin. In America alone, 8 million people lost their jobs and 6 million people lost their homes. 5 Trillion dollars in pension money, real estate value, 401k savings, and bonds vanished into thin air.
What caused this? The blatant greed of banks, and the total ignorance of the United States government. This crime, full of powerless victims resulted in just 1 banker out of thousands involved, being arrested. All of the banks who were responsible for this disaster, JP Morgen, Bank of America, and so on, were all bailed out by the government. Welcome to centralised finance.
Everything we’ve ever known about money, has been centralised. That means it’s controlled by banks, within an economy that is controlled by a government. They decide who gets a loan, when they devalue the currency, increase inflation, and everything else. If you live in America, you have no choice but to own credit cards (a consumer financial trap), and to maintain a good credit score so that you could ever hope to take out a mortgage on a home, or a loan. Many argue this kind of control is great, and all we’ve ever know. 2008 victims argue otherwise.
Decentralized finance is the exact same thing, except instead of someone at JP Morgan ironically investigating your financial credibility, DeFi consist of code forming smart contracts, in which the terms are not influenced by any government or centralized organization. Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency, is decentralized which means this form of currency is not in a governments complete control. No single person or entity controls cryptocurrency, it cannot just be devalued or taken away from you based on the whims of a government.
DeFi (decentralized finance) is also accessible to anyone with a phone and internet connection. It’s incredibly accessible on a global scale, and does not require you to register and exchange currencies with fees and tax every time you cross a boarder. This accessibility of course has pros and cons, and the total list of benefits surrounding DeFi, and why it’s much better than centralized finance is a lot to explain and I would recommend spending time reading up on this.
This is a lot to take in, but the crux of it is the difference between centralized and decentralized finance. The first iteration of DeFi, is Bitcoin. The way to imagine different cryptocurrencies is to picture them as different technologies represented by digital coins. Just as the American Dollar is a representation of the country and government, Bitcoin or Ethereum is a digital token representing the underlying block-chain technology that each project has developed.
It’s impossible to explain everything in one article and nothing about this is simple, but that’s a very basic overview on what exactly crypto is. I am a strong believer in DeFi, and have been an avid investor in crypto currency for some time. I think banks, and centralized finance is outdated and if not crypto, something else will take its place in the near future.
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
