In February 2014 I have been asked to be chairman of the first-years board of rowing club Thêta. This was a new committee on Thêta which organizes all kinds of different activities for the first year rowers. This committee has been created to enhance the bonding between the first year rowers. This was necessary, because Thêta is growing very fast. A result of this is that not everybody knows each other which again result in a less strong bonding. In the past was this bonding between 50 people better than now where the bonding between 120 people is a difficult thing to enhance.

I accepted the invitation for this committee, because this was an interesting opportunity to learn something new outside the industrial design faculty, which might come in handy later in my life. By joining this committee, I hoped to learn to plan and organize activities for a lot of people.

Our teamwork went very well. We already knew each other a bit, so that wasn’t really a problem. Also actually organizing everything went also good. This was the result of proper task distribution and different responsibilities which people had. The only thing that didn’t go very good was that sometimes it was hard to make a meeting with the other board members. Because everybody had different schedules it was really hard to make a planning whatsoever.

I learnt how to organize events for a large group of people. We organized a dinner in Tilburg after the first boat race, we organized an activity which called “Acht van de Maand’’ where two different teams once per month have a training in a boat which fits eight people and we organized an BBQ to celebrate the end of the competition to just name a few activities. I learnt hereby that communication intern and extern is essential to come to the wished result. I also learnt that you need to plan everything far for the actual happening of the event to avoid unpleasant surprises. My expectations were met. Besides I had great fun I sure did learn a lot about organizing things.

The new insights I gained by being involved are from great use from a designer point of view. As a designer you also need to organize things like a user test. The experience which I gained with this committee surely will be handy if I (with others) need to organize things for a lot of people which involves a lot of different stakeholders.