April | 33rd Board

Although the Board year technically ends in mid-June, April and May truly are the last months where we do anything outside of training our Candidate Board. As such, we’ve mostly been focused on finalising our term - making sure the realisation is correct, tying up any loose ends, making preparations for the Candidate Board to take over…

We might not have been as visible recently as we would’ve liked to be, but we did get a lot done behind the scenes! Aside from that, we’ve been planning some end-of-year activities to thank our members and a really cool party at CAVO, in collaboration with some of our wonderful MBS students 🙂

We want to thank you all for listening to us ramble throughout this year, and we wish the best of luck to the upcoming 34th BoaHello everyone !

I hope you are all doing great, I’ve just started my internship so things have been pretty busy. I thought this would be less confusing than it is :’(

Regarding Helix, I thought I would be able to combine internship and balie as I can work remotely but it turns out I can’t ☹ I wish I could be there for balie but this internship is quite complex and I am still figuring things out. It’s unfortunate but I couldn’t work properly when opening balie.

On a more positive side, thanks to our marvellous promo committee, we now have merch out which I highly recommend checking out!! They did amazing work planning the merch pics for the website and have great models!

As for the 2nd committee GA, it went very well! I’m glad to see that our announcement for the next board work. We now have a great CB which we will be announcing soon, so keep an eye out on Instagram!

As for an update on me, well I have been working a lot on my internship and haven’t taken time to do some of my hobbies. I won’t have a book or game to recommend this time, sorry ☹ I will do my best for next month though!

Hi all,

I worked on the website, and then all my progress got deleted, somehow. Other than that, I’ve been focusing on general Secretary stuff - checking the mailboxes, taking minutes… April was honestly a boring month. That’s okay, though - these months are also important!

Always yours,
Nalin <3

Hey everyone,

It’s May now, which means we’re almost at the end of our year on the board. I wonder what I’ll do with my free time once this is over, because being board takes up a huge part of your life and your time. I don’t regret at all, because I’ve gained a lot of experience, met so many people, challenged myself, and most importantly, opened up so many opportunities over the past year. Well, I have to admit that since I started my internship, I’ve been having a bit of trouble juggling everything, and I don’t think I’m the only one, but it’s only for a little while.

I didn’t do much this past month, because seeing how packed my May schedule was, I wanted to take a little break. So, I spent my weekends at home in Belgium, with nothing planned except seeing my friends and family. I also started my internship, and so far, it’s going really well. However, as I mentioned earlier, I’m really struggling right now to balance Helix and my internship because I have to stay at the office all day until around 4 p.m., so I have no choice but to schedule my meetings and do my work for Helix after my internship hours. It’s exhausting to stay at the university until very late and not have the chance to do anything when I get home. But this is only temporary, and I assure you, it wasn’t like this before my internship started.

This weekend, I'm going to Berlin on a trip organized by the Travel Committee, but you'll have a story time in the next monthly update 😉
See you soon<3

Where has the time gone???

It’s been yet another month, and the clock seems to be ticking faster than ever. And still, I’ve been having quite some fun. I graduated Honours (such a beautiful event), managed to complete all 66 km of the Amstel Gold race (plus an extra 10-15 to get to/from the finish line), the hackathon has finished (I won a little ESP32 with a screen!), I have completed my HAREC exam (Which I just got told that I passed, which means I’ll get my calling hopefully within the month) and in less than a week it will be the Helix Gala!
My internship is also progressing at a decent pace. I’m a month in, and I’ve already done the qPCRs for one and a half out of the three sets I have. It does get quite repetitive, however, it’s also somewhat zen. Surprisingly, putting this one song on repeat helps me a lot, because I already know the tempo and helps me pace myself. At my current rate I can crank out up to two 384-well qPCRs in one day.
On the froggy side of things, I’ve now finished the list of members to submit to the financial department. Just to make sure I didn’t make a mistake, I’ll send it after this week’s BM so we can all make sure there’s no (major) issues, and to reduce the conflict of interest of me deciding how much I myself should get. The CB search has been fruitful, and (probably by when this email has gone out), we are already training them. Of course, just because we finish the year, it doesn’t mean that we’ll be completely unreachable if the new Board needs help. SEP-wise there’s not many updates, as everything is running smoothly and efficiently. Keep up the great work!