Interview with old board members!

As you might know, the 10th candidate board is working hard on their policy plan for next year. When working on stuff for the future, it’s important to think about what happened in the past. With this in mind, we interviewed some of our dear old board members and asked them about experiences from their board year.

What’s the best memory you have of doing a board year at Proto?
Frank (3.0): The first fright night. We placed a piano in the woods with someone playing it, had an actual chainsaw and a zombie army. We also had a really good make-up artist!

Tom (5.0): Lightsabers and board battles. I lament the fact that we failed to find a way to combine the two.

Xadya (6.0): I really enjoyed the cosy afternoons in the Protopolis to be honest, as well as the bring your own food evenings. I think my favorite memory is the last bring your own food evening which was held as a picnic outside. We had music, nice food, good weather and lots of friends. My parents joined us as well as Erik Faber and it was just really fun.

Sarah (7.0): The unconditional support I received from Alma and Erik.

Daniela (8.0): I really liked the feutenrondje, board holiday and consitution drink. I also really liked the board training we did, it gave me interesting insights on our group dynamic and was a fun but also an informative experience. The thank you/ goodbye event for Erik Faber was also really cool to be able to organize and attend. Seeing so many people at the Thank you/Goodbye event for Erik and him making a weird and very CreaTe event out of it just made me really happy. I also really really really liked having contact with so many other parties. Not only within the study (really tho, CreaTe has the chillest staff I know, so approachable!), but also outside. Getting to know other board members from study associations and just seeing how differently everyone approached their work. It is a really nice balance between serious work and casual socializing :)

What have you learned from the most during your board year?
Laura (6.0): Working in a team and improving the association. It was great working together with the same people on a big ‘project’ for a whole year. It’s not always easy, there will be disagreements, things will go wrong and sometimes you’re completely done with everything, but you will always work it out together in the end.

Jaimy (7.0): I learned to say no. In the beginning I would always say yes when someone asked me to do something and I got really stressed about that. It also taught me how to handle difficult situations and how to fix problems in a very short amount of time.

Peter (8.0): I think the thing I learned from the most during my board year, were other members and my fellow board members. Because of that, I quickly realised that communication is key, and I always tried my best to be as open and clear as possible. This way you also have the opportunity to learn from others as it also makes you able to be open to others. With this in mind I started learning a lot in the start of my board year and continued as such during the year. Furthermore, there was the general problem solving and "extinguishing fires" that you do as a board member that made me get better at quick problem solving and fixing the issue at hand.

Maxim (8.0): Knowing that I am able to let others do tasks too.

Philippe (8.0): Being Officer of Internal Affairs and therefore the watchdog over all committees and being the board responsible of quite a number of them, made me realise how important patience is. And I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily. New committee members still need to learn a lot of things that come with committee-work. As I have been doing that for a few years already, I can't expect them to be able to do it the same way. So taking a step back, remembering that they need to get something out of it, and trying to guide them in the right direction so that they can also get the most fun out of being part of a committee was an important realisation early on.

Can you give an anecdote from your board year?
Frank (3.0): Whenever there was a student for a day at Proto, we had a race who could find the most info about this person before they came back. It was kind of bizarre what is online for some people. For one person we even found their grades at the time and the date she got her swimming diploma (C). Since then, I regularly check what people can find out about me.

Tom (5.0): Our wake up conferences, a shared phone call to start the day. We introduced them as a stopgap, because we could not stand the absence of each other's voices in the brief window between work and dreams. We'd been doing this for a while when Freek woke up SO early after a night of drinking that the glühwein didn't have the chance to cool down. He was somewhere in the twilight zone between drunk and hungover, and believed proto opened at 07:00. His bike was stolen, his fellow board members in an alcohol induced coma, and the weather excruciatingly drizzly when he dragged his way to the open Proto. As he walked, he slowly began to discover that something wasn't right. Maybe it was the newspaper boy. Maybe it were the illuminated streetlights. Maybe it was the closed stores. But the pictures of that exact moment are pure gold.

Xadya (6.0): We always lost Kasper. Either we knew where he was or we knew what he was doing, but we never knew both at the same time. We even lost him multiple times during our board holiday.

Maxim (8.0): We had a pubquiz, organised by tech companies from Almelo. We had received our name badge and apart from our name and association name, there was also a slogan which said "Verrassend Aantrekkelijk" (Roughly translated to: Surprisingly Attractive). We still don't really know how it got on there as we had thought of that quote in a completely different context.

That was it for the interview! A big thank you to the people who agreed to answer our questions!

If you would like to know more about these lovely people, check them out on the previous boards page.

This article is a summarised version of the interview. If you want to read all the responses, check it out on the wiki here.