The student is able to contribute to the development of the MADE Community.
How I have accomplished the learning goal
Item 1
The first item that shows I have met the learning goal is the classroom pitch presentation. For English we were asked to make a design for the MADE classroom and pitch this idea to our classmates. From all of the pitches one would be chosen as a winner and was said they could present their idea to the lecturers so they could maybe make the changes to the classroom. Since the beginning of the year I have tried my hardest to help out with the MADE community, and to actually get to design the classroom made me excited. Together with Kalina I made the presentation and pitched it to my classmates, it turns out they liked it since we won the pitch. We based our plan on the community building that we want to do in this specialization, one example is having round tables so that everyone can be seen as equal. It will enhance the creativity and team spirit in projects. This contributes to the MADE community as it is something we designed for the specialization and maybe in the future they could use some of our ideas as this will enhance the community feel we want to spread.
Item 2
The second item that shows I have met the learning goal is the trip to Antwerp that we organized. We organized this trip for the international part of the education as we could not find a place in the schedule on a short notice that would fit both the English and Dutch track. Adding to this our exchange students from the first semester where leaving and we wanted to have one last trip with them to celebrate their semester and at the same time learn something and build a community and friendships to never forget. Even though this trip fell trough the morning that we were supposed to go, I think it shows my contribution to the building of the MADE community as we wanted to enhance the friend and community feeling with it.
Item 3
The third item that shows I have met the learning goal is the program for the open day. As I said before I have since the beginning been motivated to help out with the MADE community. When we were asked if we could help out at the organization of the open day I agreed. I think it is important that not only the student have a great relation with each other but also to portray this to potential students. This would make it even more interesting for them to join this specialization. With the organization of the open day of course you have to have a program for everything to go smoothly, together with some fellow students we organized the whole day, did the build up and made the program. I think this contributes to the learning goal because it shows that I was actively involved in activities to help build the MADE community.
What I have learned
What I have learned is that I think it is very important to build a good relation with you classmates but also your lecturers. The friendships you will create will evolve into a community feeling really fast. I think it is important to have this community since it will help you with future projects, but it will also make it easier to ask questions or for help from your fellow students or lecturers. I also learned that it is not easy to create a community when not everyone is exited to be in one. An example I can mention is the relation between the Dutch and English course. Both courses have great connections within them and hang out together, the only problem is that they don’t come together with both courses and do the same. This made it a bit hard to create a good community feel within the whole specialization.
What went wrong
A lot of the projects we prepared for the MADE community failed. I think the cause was that everyone was very motivated in the beginning of the school year. We had loads of ideas, but it lacked in the actual organization of the ideas. A good example is the trip to Antwerp we organized. The organization went great even though it was a bit of a last minute idea, we emailed a lot of location but did not get a response. In the end we decided to still go to Antwerp with the students that signed up to join to just visit places step inside and ask if they could provide us with a tour. The day of the trip everyone canceled on going, this was a disappointment but thought us that creating such events is not as easy as it seems. I think we could have done way more in terms of building a community, and I think we did but just not with official school events or trips.
What I still want/ need to learn
the failure to create the events brought me down a little, I think I was affected by the demotivation of the group and the fact that no one actively attributed to the ideas. This made me to give up organizing and coming up with ideas as I felt it had no positive influence on the situation we were in. I want to learn not to let myself be influenced by someone else their mood or demotivation. If I could be I would be more involved in the future as I think it is important to keep in contact for future projects. I need to learn how to bring people together and lead them in the organization of events, taking the lead is one of my main goals of development.
Documents and files that show I have met the learning goal
Item 1 – Classroom pitch presentation
Item 2 – Trip to Antwerp
Item 3 – Program open day