What is in my back-pack?

So this is it: this course and the Texel project have come to an end. We, the students, spent five days in the island sharing daily life, thinking and being inspired about sustainability and working long hours to develop a final product for the municipality. A lot of things were new for me: the intensity of the work, the Dutch and the Texelaar culture, living in a studying environment with people that have similar interests, working in a multidisciplinary and international team... Undoubtedly, it was a new experience and I think I learned a lot. But what is it that we have learned?

During the final evaluation of the week, which was (again) dominated by the stress of the clock, it was difficult to put words on the learning we had done. Probably it was too soon and we were still too close to the work to get the general image. However, I still believe that the most valuable thing that I take with me from these days in Texel is difficult to be expressed in a column and it has to do with the interaction between the students in the group. In my opinion, there was a very special mix of creativity, discipline and common sense that is hard to find in a technical environment. Usually, I’m used to make a distinction between what is “uni” stuff, which is good because it exercises my brain but a lot of times can be boring or too bounded, and my personal life, in which fun, expression and emotions fit. In Texel, it seemed that these two separate worlds could come a bit more together and that the coexistence of expression and rationality was in some degree possible. This was in part caused by the not-so-technical job we were doing, which required exercising our imaginative skills, but also because the people that gathered in the island are—in my opinion—more creative, self-thinking and non-conformist than what is found on average in a technical university.

On Friday afternoon, when we were going out of the bubble, some of us thought that it was a pity that such synergy of the team working together was going to be missed as each of us will continue with their own academic work separately. In my case, my Erasmus exchange programme in Delft is also coming to an end. So for the next semester I will be back in my hometown; this southern European country where the impact of the economical crisis is very much felt on numbers young people unemployed and the segregated political situation makes very difficult steering the wheel towards sustainable development.

Who knows, perhaps in the future some of us will meet again for other interesting projects. For now, what is going to be in my back-pack is the aim to become more conscious about the consequences of my actions in the environment and the will to work towards a more sustainable way of living in this world.