Wageningen Student Farm receives support from the student welfare fund. Photo: Wageningen Student Farm The initiatives aim to improve students’ wellbeing and provide them with extra support. The projects include Giftedness, which seeks to raise awareness about and provide guidance for highly gifted students; First Generation Students, which brings together students facing specific challenges related to being the first person in their family to go to university; Science of Sleep, which teaches students current theory on sleep so they can put it into practice; and the sustainable agriculture project Wageningen Student Farm.
Quality Agreements
The Informal Student Support Network has been offering students the chance to apply for financial support for initiatives since 2019. This is budgeted for in the Quality Agreements, which lay down how the money freed up by the introduction of the loan system is used at WUR.
Woeste Hoeve, the pub in the basement of Hoevestein that runs activities for students, applied for support from the activities committee too. Jowi van Heugten of Woeste Hoeve: ‘We used to host activities and thematic parties in the pub. Covid-19 put a stop to that. The support is available for the whole of 2021. We normally run one activity in each course period and in the longer periods we run an extra theme night, but our plans might be a bit different this year because there is less scope due to the coronavirus.’
Swingo
So for the time being, activities are online. ‘In January, we ran Swingo, for example: a kind of Bingo, but music-related. And in early March, we ran a quiz with several rounds.’
The activities run by Woeste Hoeve are open to all students, says Van Heugten. ‘We are trying to make it as easy as possible to take part by keeping costs down. We don’t usually ask for a contribution from participants. When we can start running face-to-face activities again, the pub is a nice place where you can get to know new people easily and quickly.’
Buddhist inspiration
The Buddhist Inspiration Evenings get support from the fund too, says Marloes Harkema of the student chaplaincy. ‘During these evenings, you absorb a short text using the classic Lectio Divina method. The nice thing about that method is that it is very different to the way students normally approach texts. They often have to go through long texts, scan them, extract the most important points and go on to the next thing. In these inspiration evenings we spend one and a half hours on two lines.’
‘After a meditation and a brief introduction to the text, participants set to work themselves by reading the text, meditating on it, looking at what it means to them and then resting and letting the text take effect. With this slow, deep reading, you let the wisdom emerge from the text and the words sink in for you.’
Click here for an overview of all 11 student initiatives.