The onboarding days, it already feels like ages ago.... Three days of workshops where you had the opportunity to meet the people from other Master programs and the official launch of a new academic year at Antwerp Management School. Three days of getting to know one another as well as the school in an interactive way. Each day, we focused on a different topic through workshops and guest speakers. On the 12th October at 8:15AM, we walked in the foyer for the first time, the one even more nervous than the other. Everybody concentrated around the coffee stand in the middle of the foyer because we didn’t know what else to do. Awkwardly, we started having smalltalk, waiting for someone to give us instructions on the schedule.
A presentation... how?
I was in team yellow so the first day was about public speaking in which we got information on the do’s and don’ts when you give a presentation. It wasn’t only theoretical because that same afternoon, we had to put our knowledge into practice and present in front of the group. I remember, there was a guy in our group almost dying of stress. He was sweating like a pig because we only just met each other of course and you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of all the Master students, now do you? It didn’t really help that they were filming us so that we could reflect on our mistakes later on. After seeing myself, two things were clear: I will not watch that ever again and that tape definitely needs to be destroyed.
Sustainability
The next day, we had a workshop about Sustainability in which we got the assignment to go and buy a ‘sustainable’ product. I could hear you think already ‘Where to start…’ Yeah, that’s what we thought as well. After that, we needed to research if the product was actually sustainable and to what extend. By the end of the day, we presented the results to the rest of the group. The last day, we focused on Design Thinking. We got divided into teams and each got a project that we could work on. The given subjects were divers, ranging from shirts to wheelchairs?!? We were thrown in the real world to do research and come up with a solution by the end of the day for the project. We presented these ideas as well to the others.
After three days of intensive learning, hard work and fun (lol, mostly fun), it was time for a well-deserved glass of cava. The onboarding days were very informative and practical oriented. But most of all, it was epic that we got to know all the other Master students! Everyone loved interacting with one another. This is shown in the results of the enquête as well, executed after the onboarding days: for example, 86% of all the students agreed that the onboarding days helped to develop relationships with people from different nationalities.
In a word, the onboarding days were the perfect kick-off of an amazing year!!
