Dear colleagues, Last week was a busy week!
On Tuesday the Citadel building was officially opened with an event that was not unlike the Tour de CES we had last year, but now organised by the three service departments in the building (CES, LISA, SBD) and the one faculty that has colleagues there as well (EEMCS). It was great fun to dance with a robot, disassemble and assemble a laptop, take the CELT & SBD quiz (I passed fortunately), take a nice selfie, and finish with a nice cup of CELTea and CES-cream. Congratulations to the organisers, it was great to see you all work together! And of course, it was lovely to meet so many colleagues, from all departments and faculties.
On Thursday and Friday, I attended, with many other UT employees, the UNLimited Festival, organised by the Universities of the Netherlands. It was a great congress where colleagues from all universities got together to share their insights about education, research, student support, the campus, research profiles, communication, and even HR policies. After the official opening by Queen Maxima, the opening session included a rather heated exchange about internationalisation between Peter Wennink, CEO of ASML, and Robbert Dijkgraaf, the minister for Education, Culture and Science. Let me just say that Peter Wennink made very clear why the Netherlands need international students, especially in technology. You can imagine how the audience responded to that! In the smaller sessions that followed the opening, I learned about the value proposition of a university, about the campus of the 21st century, about transdisciplinary learning, and about student wellbeing. Obviously, it was also a wonderful opportunity to meet old colleagues from Leiden, Utrecht, and other networks and committees.
So that brings me to this week’s event: the first sucCES café of this academic year on Thursday! We will focus on how the Why-How-What of CES will be further used in our organisation. But as in my other two events last week, I am most looking forward to the ‘Who’ of CES, and that is all of you!
See you on Thursday!
Best wishes,
Lieke
