Student & Starter joins city board for the first time; Eva Oosters becomes youngest alder(wo)man ever

Eva Oosters (25) studied History and Law in Utrecht between 2015 and 2020, and graduated from her Master’s in Politics at VU University in Amsterdam this year. Between 2018 and 2021 she already worked as municipal council member for Student & Starter, spending one year as its party leader.

Oosters will become Utrecht’s youngest alderwoman ever, as far as is known. Her father is the Commissioner of the King in Utrecht, Hans Oosters.

In 2020, Oosters was one of DUB’s Promising Fifteen. At the time, when asked about her best character trait, she responded: “My enthusiasm.  I can be passionate about many things, which helps me with everything.”

More alumni as aldermen
On Wednesday, the five parties are presenting their coalition agreement and their candidates for the positions of aldermen. The municipality council will still have to officially approve the nominees.

Other parties have also nominated UU graduates as aldermen. D66, for instance, has presented Susanne Schilderman, who graduated from the Bachelor in Governance (2015) and the Master in Economics (2017) as a candidate-alderwoman.

Schilderman has been a member of the Utrecht municipality council since 2015; she was the youngest council member when she first started. In 2017, she too was listed (in Dutch, ed) in DUB’s annual list of fifteen most promising UU students.

GroenLinks, the biggest party in Utrecht, is once again presenting Lot van Hooijdonk for the position of alderwoman. Van Hooijdonk graduated from the History programme at the UU in 2002, and has been alderwoman since 2014. She reflected on her college days in the DUB magazine Student and City in 2019.

“It was an emotional time, with the fast rise of Pim Fortuyn. The gut feeling rose so quickly that it frightened me. Where is this society going, I wondered. That fear, for me, was a reason to go find a party that fit with the ideas I had. That was GroenLinks.”