Wetskills Romania 2017 – May 8th
“Teamwork went well and I am looking forward to the coming days!”
So we arrived here in Romania 5 days ago, first there was a weekend of teambuilding, you probably already read about this in the blogs before, but today, Monday the 8th, we have started the real work. This Monday started by getting lost on the way to the Politehnica University. We, the Dutch students, walked from our dorms to the faculty of Energetică, but apparently we were supposed to be at some other university building. After trying 3 different buildings, we finally arrived at the right building. We were welcomed with coffee, tea, lemonade, croissants and cakes, so the long walk was definitely worth it. After this, there was a small introduction about the University and the schedule for that morning. Then all the wetskills cases were introduced by the case owners.
Most cases sounded very interesting and the presentations were very clear. Our case owner wasn’t able to Skype so someone else introduced our case. This presentation was a bit less clear and we as a team couldn’t really figure out what the case was about exactly.
After the introduction of the cases, there was a speed dating session with the experts that were present. We had about 10 minutes per expert and as a team we could ask questions. This really helped our group a lot, because at first our case wasn’t clear at all, but after talking to the experts it became much clearer. Our case is about the Bașeu River, there will be a bypass from the new Bașeu River to the old Bașeu River to restore the water flow in the old river. We are asked to design this bypass and investigate the effects on the communities and the area. This became clearer during the discussions with the experts, we as a team came up with quite a few solutions and ideas for our case. It also helped that the experts were all quite different, this way we heard different opinions and ideas about our case. Also they gave us a few suggestions to look into, for example the involvement of the communities. The discussions with the experts helped to make the case livelier and it motivated us to start the project. Also it was very helpful for us so we could understand what our case was about.
After the discussions we had a catered lunch, there was a lot of food and everything tasted great. The rest of the afternoon we worked on our plan of action, which surprisingly turned out okay. At 6 o’clock we went to the supermarket to get some dinner. We ate in het hallway of our dorms, the same place we ate as the night before. And during the dinner we found out that we finally had access to hot water, so we could have a nice warm shower! This was probably the best part of the day, even though the hot water is sadly already gone. Today was actually a very interesting day with lots of laughs and much information. The teamwork went well and I am looking forward to the coming days!
la revedere,
By Eva Holtus (Van Hall Larenstein Aniversity of Applied Sciences)
