Extra Curricular: Student Assistant – Simon à Campo

of the Design for Creatives Squad

Type:

Extracurricular

challenge:

Guide the Design for Creatives Squad

Role:

Planning activities, communicating with the squad, sharing my expertise about crowdsourcing and creating a community feeling.

Explanation

For 1,5 years I have been the student assistant for the squads Design for Creatives. My activities involved mostly communicating with the students about meetings, planning these meetings and setting up the demo-day for students. I created a logo for the squad so we could differentiate from other squads in the faculty. I used Slack to communicated with the students and made sure it remained actively used. They used it to share interesting papers, upload their presentations and get feedback on their concepts. Together with Javed we decided what was best for the squad in terms of results and learning activities. I involved Bas from Design2Gather in the squads as Industry liaison.

Reflection

Key learning points: coaching, planning

For three semester I have been squad assistant for the same squad. What surprised me was that the first semester as squad assistant was actually the best. I mean this in the sense that the squad was a close community of students supporting each other. This was because I was a M1.2 student myself and thus was one of the students of the squad. When moving upstairs to the graduation space in my M2.1, I had less connection with the squad. In my M2.2 this became even less given the focus I needed to have on my own activities. This showed me how important it is to be part of a community itself in order to lead it and make it successful. We had rituals within the squad of creating profile pictures with headbands in the first semester. I never could recreate this close community in the semester afterward just because I wasn’t physically present in the space where the students worked. I used this phenomenon to explain how I would fulfill my role as community manager for the Innovation Space. I explained to them how important it was that the community manager was always present and thus approachable within the space.