English
Very often people ask me what it is I do exactly, as a fulltime member of the University Council. To be very honest, I only found that out when we started three months ago. A few of my colleagues in Utrecht tried to describe it and came up with a trinity; sending emails, talking and reading. I couldn’t agree more! But what is it that we send emails, talk and read about every single day? In order to illustrate this, I would like to introduce another trinity.
Our duties as members of the University Council can be divided into three elements. The first and most obvious one; the cycle of the University Council. The documents for the monthly meeting with the Council will be sent to us in the middle of the month. Subsequently, when we have had about a week to read these documents, the committee meetings will take place on the third Thursday of the month. These are a preparation for the meeting with the entire University Council, and during these committee meetings we have the opportunity to clarify every detail of the documents, and their exact meaning. One week later, during the council meeting on the last Thursday of the month, this allows us to have a discussion focused on content, to exchange visions between the Board of the university and the Council and hopefully to agree upon the policy. This first element of our duties occupies especially the second half of the month, making it the busiest part of the month.
The second element is the contact we have with other students. As a faction consisting of six students, we do have our own opinion and vision of how the education at the University of Groningen (UoG) ideally would be formed. But in order to know which problems there are or which things are on the contrary well done and should be implemented across the entire university, we also frequently get in touch with every student association that has anything to do with the UoG. This means that we drink lots of coffee with the boards of study-, student-, and sports associations, as well as visit their constitution drinks. Some associations are more directly confronted with the policy of the university than others, but they all have members of whom we are interested to know which things are important for them.
Thirdly comes an element that takes place behind the scenes but is equally as important as the first two. This element concerns the making use of our right of initiative, by writing reports. When we want to put our election program into practice, most of it will be done by writing these reports. This means that we tackle a problem, write a report about it and then send it to the Board of the University. In order to write the report, we first do research and come up with possible solutions for the problem. We examine whether different solutions are actually achievable and all of this will be put in the final report about the problem. Then it is up to the Board to formulate their opinion on it. When we come up with a good idea and solutions that are achievable, they usually have no other option than to fully agree with our report! For example, we are currently working on the realization of a report of our predecessors, which concerns the implementation of a university wide mentor program for international students. The Board agreed upon our ideas stated in the report and supports us in implementing them. This is very good news of course and we hope that our own reports will be received in a comparable, positive way!
To finally get back to the question of what we do, keeping the above mentioned in mind, a regular day for me goes as follows: meeting for coffee with a board member of a study association (my contacts are among others the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Economics and Business and the corresponding associations), reading documents for the upcoming meeting with the University Council, meeting with our faction to discuss these documents and other relevant things, then at the end of the day I’ll be going to a constitution drink (or several) and in the evening I’ll answer a couple of e-mails, arrange some things for our internal organization or work on a report, until it is time to go to bed exhausted. The next day will be just as busy as the last!
Rowanne Degenhart is a law student and doing the Research Master Functionality of Law. This year however she is focussing on her duties as a member of Lijst Calimero and active in, among others, the committees of Management and Resources.