Ready, steady, go!
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Canals, bridges, cobblestones… canals, bridges, cobblestones… in the historical city centre every corner look exactly the same. Especially if it’s 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re trying to figure out where the hell did you park your bike before the party.
Three weeks have passed since my first introductory post — you may wonder, what’s this silence already? Well, in contrast with the first exploratory week, these three weeks were quite intense in pace. Especially because there were only two weeks that I spent in the Netherlands. I enjoyed the one in the middle in Hungary at the Fishing on Orfű music festival, where I had the opportunity to reunite with my beloved friends at home, while attending the concerts of my favourite Hungarian bands. Though I could also elaborate on the various culinary and winery experiences I had at the festival, this post will be about the week before, as well as about the week after my Hungarian adventure.
Even though I felt lonely at the time, in hindsight, I feel lucky I had the time to settle in my new apartment conveniently and to explore Delft and its neighbourhood all by myself. My first week here in the Netherlands was meant to be all about these. By the time the chain of events and encounters had started to rapidly accelerate, I was already confident navigating through my daily activities here.
Everything started on a Wednesday, on a campus tour organized by the university. We were put in groups of 10 students lead by a mentor, who guided us through the TU Delft campus on the one-day tour. The groups were constructed in a random manner, putting together master’s students from different programmes. The resulting composition of our group was also an accidental, but not less an extraordinary one. The six of us managed to form a lasting friendship on the same day, which since then also became a close-knit one. From that Wednesday, we jumped into the nightlife of Delft together for four days in a row: visited the famous Beestenmarkt terrace in the city centre, checked out the colourful university bars, got invited to crazy house parties. Once we became overwhelmed by the amount of drinks we had, and the lack of sleep we exposed ourselves, we just continued with chilling at the beach of Delftse Hout, a beautiful lake close by.
Hardly had I got back from Hungary when the first academic quarter just started. For me, this meant an intense, one-week bootcamp course on designing in complex systems. Although lectures were scattered throughout the week, the true emphasis was on extensive teamwork. Both in larger teams and in atomic subteams, we were asked to deliver a complete conceptual design for a to-be-built bike parking facility on campus. Starting from the client problem statement, we had to move through several design phases keeping physical, institutional and managerial constraints in sight, reaching the final design objectives through intrateam and inter-team collaborations. Apart from this project, we were invited to play a well-crafted negotiation game which introduced us to the struggles of multi-actor decision-making in networked systems: each subteam represented CO2-emitting companies in a port, who had to collaborate on creating mutually beneficial contractual agreements for CO2 capture and transport, following the introduction of a CO2 emission law.
It was quite an intense week to begin with, the workload required us to be active from 9:00 to 17:00 every day. I’m glad that I didn’t have to spend this time mostly attending lectures, but rather with being involved in endless conversations, presentations and constant feedback. In the end, the bootcamp successfully communicated its message: I got an idea of what it means to design in a complex system. While during my bachelor’s I mainly sat at the drawing table carefully engineering the artifacts on my own, this master’s programme will show me how it is done on a large scale, with various stakeholders involved both on an organizational, governmental and societal level.
Finally, the best way to celebrate the end of the bootcamp was to head out for a picnic on top of the TU Delft library, taking advantage of the wonderful weather we had here on the weekend. I wonder when I will see such a bright blue sky in the Netherlands again.
