Wetskills-USA 2023, by Meinke van Oenen (TU Delft)
As a start of the Wetskills programme we explored the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps or the Capital of the World: New York City! By combining some sightseeing with teambuilding, we found out that it truly lives up to it’s name.
In the morning we kicked the day off with a windy ferry ride to Staten Island that passed the Statue of Liberty. When going back we were greeted with a beautiful view of the NYC skyline. The single sightseeing part of the day stopped here, as we integrated some teambuilding. We started the Crazy 88 challenge. This required quite some teamwork as we were given different, kind of funky, challenges. Some examples are: ‘sing Barbie Girl in the middle of the street’, ‘do a flash mob in a souq’ or ‘do a sword fight with cucumbers’. The point was to complete as many challenges as possible to win.
My team with Ayanda Mafunda, Samah Iqtaish and Mare de Wit (who unfortunately had not arrived in New York yet) decided to complete our challenges while exploring Wallstreet. Here we checked out the New York Stock Exchange with the Fearless Girl and the Charging Bull. After this we took to the subway to the ‘Center of the Universe’ also known as Times Square. It turned out we were not the only ones with this idea, since we ran into multiple of the other participants, with whom we spend the rest of the day.
All in all it was a very impressive and fun day, that functioned as a great starter for the Wetskills programme. Tomorrow it is officially time to buckle down and start working on our water challenges. But with all the inspiration and energy we gained from today that should be no problem.
