The highlights of my board year

You always hear those stories of boardies being extremely busy and having no time left in their agendas. And then you wonder: will this be true? Well yes, I can guarantee this is true! This of course also depends on how busy you want to make it for yourself, since you also need to have life besides your board year.
Written by: Joris Piree

Of course, some weeks will be busier than other weeks, but a lot of days I will not spend that much time at home. However, this is actually the part that makes a board year so different and enjoyable. During the day you spend the whole day at the rooms, busy with meetings, phone calls, mailing and a lot of other ongoing work, and then after this long day you will often have another fun activity, which can be a drink, a dinner with one of our great committees or some other joyful activity. And that is just awesome!

The days I like the most are the days completely occupied with meetings. During those days you are running from one side to the other side, and seeing a lot of people, while talking about events and other things we are organizing. One of the reasons for that is because I really like setting up events and improving them, and even more if we can do this with a committee.

During my board year the past half year we have already had some great events, but I will highlight the ones I had the opportunity to be part of. The first one is the Actuary Day of Tilburg, which was an event that was planned to be held the year before, but in the end turned out to take place in the beginning of September. For this event there was no committee organizing it, so I had to do this during my first months as a,candidate board member together with my predecessor Anne and fellow board member Wenxin. Luckily we were able to manage this ourselves and it turned out to be a great day.

Not long after this event the second one was already getting closer: the Finance Expedition. The committee for this event started months before I joined, and so I just had to play my role in an already ongoing committee. Fortunately the committee had been doing a great job at that time, so there was no trouble rolling into this. In the second week of November the event was finally there and we went to Amsterdam with a group of 24 ambitious students with an interest in the world of Finance. During those three days I discovered a new world and at that time I made the decision that I would want to follow the QFAS master after my board year.

While writing this piece the next event still has to take place, but even more will follow. In a couple of weeks from now we will have our Connection Day at the campus of Tilburg University. On the other hand, the previous event has recently taken place, the Strategy Tour, in which we visited three consultancy companies to see how their daily business looks like.

However, I am looking forward to the lustrum week that will take place in the first week of May to celebrate our 40th anniversary the most and I am proud that I can be part of that. Doing a board year in a lustrum year makes it even more special than it already is. Since the start of my board year I have taken place in the lustrum committee to organize this week and I am glad to see that everything is going this well. They have been working so hard on this and I am sure this is going to be an unforgettable week!

The last event I would like to elaborate on is one of our new events we have been able to set up for the first time in history, namely the Hackathon Tilburg, organized together with Asset | SBIT and DSA Pattern. This event will take place in the start of October, and during this day econometricians, as well as Business IT students and Data Scientists, will compete to find the best solution in a nowadays business problem. Getting started with this new event was a great thing to do, since we have the opportunity to start from the ground and brainstorm about new ideas. I am looking forward to work together with a committee on making this event a great success.

All in all this year has been an exciting year for now in which I have already had the opportunity to meet nice and interesting people, to work together on organizing great events, and to run all day long from one meeting into another one.