Intro Week 2022

The introduction week. It’s the first time you’ll meet your fellow students. Personally, I came in a bit late for the check-in, so when I arrived, I got given my shirt and we we’re told to get moving straight away. The first thing we did was a crazy 88 style challenge. So basically, we were given a bunch of mini challenges we’d have to complete. The challenges ranged from hugging a tree to petting a dog. Also, one of the challenges was that we were given pictures of places in Eindhoven that we had to find. After doing a bunch of these challenges, we were told to come to Bartenders on Stratumseind. Here, we were given some very interesting directions on how we were supposed to get to the camp site. Our group tried following it, but honestly, we failed miserably. Once we finally made it to the camping, we placed our stuff in one of the 2 big tents. Later that night, we had our first big activity, a dropping. Basically, we we’re sent out with a couple of big busses to the middle of nowhere. The organisation told us to go either 2 directions and not the third direction. With our group’s tendency to pick exact wrong option, we obviously went the complete wrong way. With all of us having to walk for 5 hours and about 20 kilometres, we all ended up being quite annoyed. Eventually we ended up getting back to camp site at about 4:30 in the morning with us being the last group to get back. The next day, we were woken up in the loveliest way possible, SpongeBob hardstyle. We we’re given breakfast, which luckily energized us for the rest of the day. The first activity of the day was a competition against all the other groups to build a catapult that could shoot a can of beer the furthest. To build this, every group was given the remains of what used to be some pallets. We also got to use some saws and hammers, and If you were lucky enough, nails or screws. With these tools you’d be able to actually build something that worked. One of the best tactics was to just steal stuff from other groups so you had more recourses.

Our group ended up building a sort of good catapult that was able to shoot quite a nice distance. After this, we went on to personally my favourite activity of the entire week: canoeing in the Dommel! Together with the entirety of Innovum, lots of chaos and beer was involved. At the start, I figured we’d just have a nice time by simply

canoeing down the stream. But this quickly turned into everyone flipping each other’s boats. Good thing the weather was quite hot so no mind getting a bit wet while having a good time. After canoeing, we we’re taken back to the campground for some well-deserved dinner. Which was quite needed since we were told to get ready for the carnaval themed party afterwards. The party itself took place on the camping which was nice since we didn’t have to cycle or take the bus anywhere.

The next day we got woken up at 8 AM, AGAIN! But this time it wasn’t as bad since we were in bed before 4:30 AM. As usual, we got our breakfast from the crew which we very much enjoyed. Then afterwards, we cleaned up the mess we made the night before and got ready to take the bus back to Fontys for our first activity of the day. When we eventually arrived at school, we were told what the task would be. We would get a grinder that had to be used to build a car. Our group came up with a smart construction in the form of a T shaped appendment that could be attached to the grinder. In addition, we also made saw type wheels that would accelerate the car. This took us about 2 hours to complete which was more than enough time. The only real problem we had was that we lost an attachment piece of the grinder... But we had a great solution for this. We stole it from another group that hadn’t even started work on their car :)

After our great effort building the car, we were taken back to the camp site, where we encountered our next problem. It was really hot outside with basically no shelter from the sun. Luckily, we were allowed to use the swimming pool that was on site. Unfortunately, not for very long since all 350 people from the camping had to use it. But, since we were the first group that was allowed use of the pool, we were allowed a second go after everyone else went. After a while, we started the grinder race, we quickly noticed a major flaw in our car. It didn’t have anything that kept it in a straight line. So, our car just turned right and buried itself in the wall. In addition, it ended up destroying the track it drove on, and thus we ended up being eliminated the very first round. Our solution: grab some beers and enjoy ourselves together with the international students that had joined us on the camp site. This basically went on for the entire night till the moment I decided to go to bed. But there was one downside, I got woken up by my group in the middle of the night by them trying to cover me in Innovum stickers. When I finally woke up, some guy from my group pulled another prank on me. Basically, he covered me from head to toe with shaving cream. Which at the time, I didn’t really appreciate it so my genius response was to chase one of the other members of my group around the camp site

while still covered in shaving cream…

The next day, we had a bit of a different day. To start out it was basically just a clean and pack-up day. We ended up saying goodbye to the camp site and started our journey back to Eindhoven on the bike. We were told to just take the stuff with us that we wanted to take to The Purple festival. So, we were all packed quite lightly when we went out to get some lunch at Hizmet. At last, we ended up going to Fontys where a bus was waiting for us to take us to Tilburg for Purple. Once we got there, they had a very weird rule where we could only start drinking alcohol past 4 PM, but the problem was that we arrived around 3 PM. So, we had an entire hour of just dancing and the real fun started after. When buying a beer at Purple, you also pay a deposit for the cup. This obviously sounds like a great business idea, but my intro group had a better one. We started collecting these cups and asking people to donate theirs. We ended up building about 2 towers that were 1,5 m tall. To be honest, I don’t remember what we ended up doing with those towers since I was too far gone.

After Purple, we were transported back to the TU/e gym where we would be sleeping that night. I chose to go home that night since I was exhausted. I really enjoyed my introduction week and I made some great friends along the way. It was a great way to start my new studies!