By - 27 October 2020
Our journey began in March of this year, just days after the university was closed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Therefore, we started the committee through an online meeting, which is, as you might expect, suboptimal. Of course, not all of us knew each other that well and we found out that it was also quite difficult to get to do so online. Therefore, when circumstances allowed, we had our first commissieuitje in June. Since we had not seen each other face to face yet since becoming a committee, and we did not yet know much about each other apart from some weird facts, we did a fun game in which we got to know more about each other, which were surprisingly, again mainly only weird facts. Apparently, someone of us can ride a unicycle, another one does not like animals at all (?!) and someone has a lot of troubles with hangovers (but more on this later, I don’t want to spoil anything yet). Meeting in real life was very nice for us and made us feel like a real IntroCie for the first time. Another thing that COVID spoiled for us was the infamous knowledge transfer session with the IntroCie of last year. This was partially lost in the pandemic and also kind of forgotten, but this of course opens up the opportunity for a three-way-knowledge-transfer-session for next year’s committee .
The preparation for the introduction week was, gently put, a rollercoaster. As a board responsible, I frequently joined meetings with the other study associations and the FSE in which we discussed the introduction week. However, when I met with the IntroCie afterward, there was hardly anything to tell. We as a committee were dependent on the FSE, who was in turn dependent on the Central Introduction Committee (CIC), who was in turn dependent on the TU/e, who was in turn dependent on the national government. Summarized, this entailed that no one really knew what was going on and what measures were being taken. You might imagine that this is quite stressful and tiresome as a committee trying to plan a large event, and it was. However, despite this lack of information, we had a very good brainstorm, leading to the still very festive theme of Hawaii (or deserted island, tropical, or something like that, I don’t believe there was ever any kind of certainty about this). And with a theme, of course, also the shirt colors had to be determined. One of the ideas that instantly came to mind was to just give the kiddos and the parents Hawaii shirts, but after some consideration, we decided that this was sadly not very feasible. Still, we managed to capture the Hawaii feeling in our shirt colors, one of which having an equally undetermined term. We described the kiddo shirts to be perzik-oranje-roze-perzik (iets met perzik), at least, that’s how I got it from the brainstorm minutes. The parents’ shirts were described as dark turquoise, and we were quite happy with how they turned out.
The uncertainty regarding the introduction week led to us not being sure whether to order the shirts, for which sponsors had to be sought. However, it wasn’t long after until the green light was given and the intro was a go! Fast-forward a few weeks and we find ourselves in the interim week, especially reserved by (almost) all IntroCie members to keihard beun on all the intro activities. Luckily, the Internaat was open for us, meaning we had our own space to work, making this a lot more gezellig and making sure we got things done. The things that were more difficult regarding taking up work, communicating, etc. during online meetings were now a thing of the past and before I knew it, people were working on the booklet, there was a task force for the business case and everyone was doing their thing. Another thing that was nice about being able to work in the Internaat was the presence of chalkboards. The chalkboards above the bar were now serving as a live bierpunt counter and boy was that necessary. We had the, very doable, deadline of being in the Internaat before 10 in the morning during the interim week. However, it did not appear to be ‘very doable’ for some of us (not naming anyone in particular, except of course for Arlette). Not for long, the live bierpunt counter was quite filled up with bierpuntjes, most of which are still to be cashed in by the committee. Next to working quite hard, we also had dinner together and had fun evenings together, making our experience as being the IntroCie a lot of fun, even though there was a pandemic going on.
Having prepared almost everything for the introduction week, we felt quite prepared, except for the notion that we had little to no idea about what would be going on during the online part of the week itself. For those of you that do not know, the introduction week consisted of 2 offline days and 3 online days, on which kiddos and their parents could attend presentations, quizzes, and workshops and perhaps play some Skribbl.io in the meantime. During the offline days, the kiddos became acquainted with the university and the department by a tour, the good-ol’ Green Strip Market (GSM), a business case, and several workshops. Sadly, there were no parties at either the campus or Stratumseind this year, something which some groups might or might not have recreated at home #JusticeForGroup14.