Wetskills South Korea 2019 –
by Sanne de Smet (Delft University of Technology) –
Well I thought that writing a blog would be the perfect activity to kill some time during my lay-over in Beijing.. but I couldn’t have be more wrong. It’s about midnight now in Amsterdam and after a flight of more than 8 hours I’m pretty exhausted. Luckily, my excitement for Wetskills got me through this. I spend most of the time on the flight either sleeping, watching movies or thinking about which cases I wanted to do and doing so it made me even more enthusiastic. Now, a little sleep-deprived, I will try to formulate why I wanted to join Wetskills and what my expectations are for the South Korean adventure.
When I first heard about the Wetskills program (little bit more than half a year ago), I decided I wanted to attend one of their program-weeks. Not just for the network and the new friends you get from it, but even more because it’s a great way to get in touch with the ‘real world’ and have the opportunity to voice your opinion on water-related problems. Unfortunately, due to study it was hard find one that fitted in my schedule. But then South-Korea was uploaded, which fitted perfectly, and I signed up (and got accepted).
The closer we got to the starting date, the more information was given and the more activities were announced and made clear. And as so, my enthusiasm grow. I think that Wetskills is a great opportunity for young professionals, and students (like me) to work in an international, multidisciplinary team. And, maybe even more importantly, think about challenges ahead of us regarding water security and maybe even energy security.
As a Dutch person I can say that I took safe and assessable drinking water for granted for most of my life, however during my studies and travels I was faced with the reality that safe water is like gold; rare and unevenly distributed over the world. Besides that, I noticed that the students around me -and including me- got concerned with the environment and the planet in general. Therefore, I believe that our generation should play an important role already with decisions and ideas for the future. Wetskills is one of the opportunities to do so.
I’m very excited to combine my views and knowledge with the other students/young professionals and have two great weeks together. Furthermore, I’m really curious about the South-Korean culture. I have travelled before, but never to this side of the world, so surprise me with the culture, food habits, and way of working together. I think we can learn a lot from each other. To start with, try to teach me how to eat with metal sticks.. It will be a challenge.
So to concluded, I believe that after these two weeks I will have made new international friends, tasted new food and beer, sang some karaoke (sorry, it’s a stereotype), gained a lot of new knowledge and in general had a great time here. Thanks for having me, can’t wait to get started!
