Copenhagen, Denmark – 18 August 2021 – Wetskills Challenge Day 4
By Nynke van der Helm (University of Groningen)
Yesterday we got to know our cases, so today it was time to get to know ourselves. We did so by doing the Belbin personality test. This test showed the role that you are most comfortable with in a group. It was cool to see that the outcome of the test also really did fit by most people. Knowing which roles fit by your group members really helps by dividing the tasks and knowing how other people like to work. This also gives the opportunity for people to see if they want to learn other roles in groups, or if there are any roles missing in the group. Sadly, the latter is found in our group as we don’t have anyone with a strong focus on completing. 😢
Today was a very special day for our team as our fourth and final group member, Francisca, was able to join us. It was nice to put a face to the person and hear more about who she is! After getting to know each other and our role in a group it was time to get back to the group work. After creating an action plan yesterday, today was the first day of actually following this plan. For us this meant getting more background information and starting with brainstorming ideas.
In the afternoon we got some feedback on the action plan that we created yesterday. This was a nice moment of feedback, which showed us that Wetskills is all about thinking outside of the box. After this we went back to our laptops to work on our case. This meant a lot of sitting down, but luckily Anusha has a program on her laptop that tells you when you need to take a break. This meant that we would stand up, do 
some stretching and sometimes even some dancing in the room every once in a while. These were, next to good for the body, also great energizers throughout the day. Another good energizer is of course coffee, yet yesterday it was really difficult to get coffee. The machine we tried to use would sometimes work after 4 tries, sometimes right away or just not at all. Luckily today we found out where we could get coffee without the difficulty of trying to figure out how to pay for it. This was a real victory, as coffee is most definitely needed with these long working days!
At night we cooked our first group meal for all the Wetskills attendees (and the supervisor) that are staying in the hostel. It was really nice to eat together as a group! ☺️
