2020 Cohort
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= '''Fall 2020 Priorities'''<br/> =
== Student activism ==
In the Netherlands, student activism can be a big part of student life. It can be a valuable addition to their time on our campus, helping develop their social skills and organizational competencies. For that, the UT offers a wide variety of possibilities and facilitates them, for example, with grants. However, many students are not active because they think they don’t have enough time, don’t see the value of it, or simply do not know about the different options. <br/>
Therefore, we aim to increase the number of active students and encourage especially those that have not been exposed to activism before. For that, we want to create a video series that explains the basics of activism, for example, what the different functions in a board are. Additionally, we would like to create a website on which students can find their perfect fit. An interactive quiz and/or a catalog can help to find everyone’s perfect fit, make activism more transparent, and increase the connections among students in those boards/committees/teams. After all, they often are interdisciplinary.
== Interdisciplinary projects and mentoring ==
In the Twente region, hundreds of startups are found by UT students, built around outstanding ideas and mindsets. With Novel-T, Incubase, and similar resources, the University of Twente supports founders and innovators throughout the whole process of starting and scaling their business. But every beginning is difficult and so innovators oftentimes struggle organizing their dream team to realize their amazing ideas. <br/>
Therefore, it is our goal to create an environment that enables and encourages students to offer their expertise and look for like-minded business partners. Additionally, we want to simplify getting in touch with experts for short questions and guidelines on projects. Thus, we strive to include professionals as well as alumni from the University to offer their support to young dreamers.
While we are focussing on the students and their projects, we also want to add value for the University and municipality. Therefore, we want to offer these stakeholders to advertise interesting projects for students to work on. This also allows students aiming to gain working experience to engage in regional projects and improve their environment.
== Mental health and student wellbeing ==
As a topic, this is broad, multifaceted, and seems to be a recurring issue the students want to be addressed. However, there is significant difficulty in identifying exactly where the problem lies. The UT offers quite a significant amount of supposed help, different people to go to depending on what the issue is, they claim to want to stay informed on how students are doing, and yet students continue to struggle and lack visible change. Tackling this problem as a whole would be a very time consuming and challenging task.
Whilst there is potential for the future, we found a more introductory issue to address would be abstracting it to a potential root of the problem. Working under the understanding that stress in students originates amongst other things from university and the questions one may ask themselves at this point in life, we hope to create a tool that allows students to set themselves apart with this in a healthy way, ideally preventing or postponing the point at which it gets difficult enough to request external help.
The key lies in bringing out many small options and being able to quickly modify them, restricting the time and cost each effort takes and hoping to maximize the number of students helped. To do this we will remain in close contact with the three stakeholder groups of ‘experts’, students, and research.
== Connecting Universities in the Netherlands ==
We see potential in forming stronger connections and collaborations between universities in the Netherlands. As part of the 4TU already, Twente has the theoretical connection to these other technical universities, however, we believe it can be maximized and is not yet used to its fullest. Especially during these unprecedented times in which the nature of education is drastically changing with little preparation time, there is much to learn from how others are tackling the problems they are facing. The details are yet to be ironed out, yet the focus area is known, namely education and networking potential. Opening up streams allowing for communication could help advance courses, learn from others' mistakes and feedback, and get into contact with those who have the desired expertise.
= Related Links =
