Committees insAIde: The PC
Tue, 15 Oct 2019
written by Kim Bladder
In general, most of our parents have no clue what we are doing at university. They might have seen AI in the news multiple times by now, thinking: hey, that’s what my son/daughter is studying! However, they still don’t really know what our study entails. To give our parents a better view about our study and to let them feel our struggles in lecture halls, we organize a Parents day. During this day our parents (or other family members) will learn more about the AI programme and about student life in Nijmegen.
However, such a day won’t organize itself and thus we have a committee who does that for us: the Parents day Committee (PC). In this post I will tell you a bit about what the PC does and about my experiences in the PC as a first year student. Maybe I will even convince you to try out this relatively small committee.
The PC
In order to make such a day a success we have to take care of a few things: location, activities, communication with the parents, lunch and drinks. For the activities during the day we organized some lectures, water pong, a Kahoot and study assignments on programming and formal reasoning. Due to the diversity of tasks within this committee you can nicely orientate in what you like to organize. Last year, we organized the first international edition, which means that we even had some international parents who would come over to the Radboud university for the Parents day.
My experiences
When I joined CognAC, I wanted to be active, but I wasn’t sure whether I would like being in a committee. Therefore, I decided to join one relatively low-key committee to try it out. I joined the PC, because it’s relatively serious and you’re working about half a year towards one event. Besides, you have the feeling that you can be of help to not only your fellow students, but also to their parents. The parents of some of my friends now know me as the girl with the bamboo stick we had to follow the whole day, which is great. I liked the fact that we as a committee were really appreciated by the guests for organizing the day. A few of the sweet reactions we got at the evaluation form were:
“Keep up the good work ! I enjoyed this day very much, so did my student-daughter. Thank you !”
“Very well organized. Thank you so much for all your effort!”
“Good job! Thanks :) I would join again.”
“Big compliment to the organising committee. Well done!”
In short, I’m really glad I joined the PC. As you might have noticed by now, I liked being active and being in the committee. If I wouldn’t have joined the PC, I wouldn’t have been the Treasurer of our association now ?. For me it was a great experience, I learned a lot about committee work and about CognAC and I got to know some older year students, which I wouldn’t have been in contact with otherwise. At the beginning of the year, we had a meeting around every two weeks and later we met up every week to arrange the final things. Besides, the amount of work that needed to be done outside the meetings was definitely doable. Therefore, I could easily combine the committee with my study as I know that might be a concern for first year students. My parents also participated during the day and even though I might not been able to sit next to them during a lecture, I made sure that I was the leader of my parents’ group, so that I could still hang out with them and try to help them solving the questions. I know that they even liked to see me organizing the event and being active, as that’s also a part of what I’m doing in Nijmegen.
Final remarks
I hope that you now have a better view of the PC. As you might have noticed, we’re still looking for members for this years Parents day Committee. Do you also want to try out this committee and see whether you would like committee work or are you inspired by my post and would you like to make the next edition also a success? You can sign up by sending an email to intern@svcognac.nl ?. If you have any questions, feel free to send an email to me at treasurer@svcognac.nl.