Welcome Week manages to find just enough mentors this time

“It’s really difficult to find mentors. I think it has to do with the fact that there is no association or organisation connected to Welcome Week, so it’s hard to reach them,” sighs Eline Bollaart, Project Leader for Welcome Week. This is a sigh of relief as well, as 100 UU students volunteered to be mentors this year – just enough to make sure that each group has a mentor. Over 2,300 international freshers registered to participate in the 2023 Welcome Week.

In 2022, Bollaart’s team was forced to come up with a creative solution to deal with the low number of volunteers. First-year students themselves were invited to lead their own groups. This year, even though there was no need for them to do that, the organisers decided not to do away with group leaders just yet. “Mostly, because the leaders themselves seemed to really enjoy it,” she explains.

“The students were a bit confused that the leaders didn’t know much about Utrecht. But, if you ask me questions about the city, I’m sure I will not be able to answer them all even though I live here. The mentors are not supposed to know everything. The most important thing is for the person leading the group to be helpful. ‘I don’t know but let’s find out together!’” she says. This year, the first-year students who chose to act as group leaders served as the mentors’ helpers, so each group had two people to turn to for guidance and questions.

It is not yet clear whether this model will be repeated next year. But Bollaart says that efforts will need to be made so that enough mentors are found.

Workshops
This year’s Welcome Week programme stood out for the wide range of “culture workshops”, with themes like knitting, crochet, public speaking, zero waste DYI, Delft painting, and yoga. DUB joined one of them, which taught participants about local customs. Some of these activities were location-bound, but most were not. “We always want to provide students with evening activities, but that’s tricky because there are so many of them. We would need to split them into fifteen different locations,” says Bollaart.

That’s why her team came up with “evening activities to go”: after participants choose a workshop, they get a bag with everything they need to do that activity. However, in order to perform the activity, they need a certain amount of tokens and the bag is always a couple tokens short, demanding them to look for other people interested in the same activity. “This way, students will meet people with similar interests and do something together wherever they want.” The idea was inspired by the pandemic, when people would get together online to perform all sorts of activities. “We can keep the good aspects of that.”

Based on the number of bags retrieved for each activity, the Welcome Week team will see which ones are the most popular. Perhaps they will make a comeback next year, according to Bollaart.