Board year at AEGEE-Leiden

My board year at AEGEE-Leiden has been one of the most impactful events in my life so far. I vividly remember a conversation in my first year at Leiden University where I expressed my bewilderment about people who intentionally delay their studies with such pursuits, yet two years later I was the Internal Affairs Officer of the most fun student association in Leiden.

About AEGEE-Leiden

AEGEE-Leiden is one of the smaller student associations in Leiden with about 350 members and is themed as the ‘European student travel association’. The larger AEGEE network revolves around intercultural exchange, personal development and thematic projects. In Leiden, however, there is also a very strong social aspect with weekly drinks and activities and many trips all across Europe. I joined them in my first year at Leiden University, attracted by the open-mindedness and the lack of stereotypical student association characteristics such as a heavy drinking culture.

My motivation

After having done some committee work in my first year, I became more active in the second year once I had moved to Leiden. I gained a lot in terms of personal development and meaningful relationships, and I figured that doing a board year would enable me both to give something back to the association as well as to learn a lot more still, especially skills that were not addressed in my education. Additionally, it would give me some time to follow some extra courses in computer science, by delaying graduation from my bachelor’s degree for a year. After the application procedure, I became part of the 39th board of AEGEE-Leiden, along with five others who became close friends during the 2019-2020 academic year.

During our term

A lot of things are involved with doing a board year. There are the basics that are the same every year, such as board meetings, managing committees and organising and attending events. There are the function-specific tasks, which for the Internal Affairs Officer involve keeping close contact with various groups within the organisation, maintaining the communication channels (including writing the newsletter), and ensuring that all members feel at home in the association and at events. Additionally, I was part of the confidential body of AEGEE-Leiden. Overarching to all these tasks is the policy that my board wrote prior to our board year, which discusses all the changes and improvements to the status quo we wanted to make. For me personally, I wanted to improve or automate some of the tasks that are done every year, so that future boards have to spend less time on those things and can instead focus on other projects.

Challenges and opportunities

Nevertheless, the most challenging parts of a board year are those that you cannot prepare for. At some point, we had to expel a member due to inappropriate behaviour, which was a rather impactful process for everyone involved. However, the biggest challenge posed on us was by far the COVID-19 pandemic, which had us cancel all the physical events in the second half of our term, and required us to come up with new ways of keeping our members engaged. While I think we did a good job on that part, it was sad to see so much potentially great events being thrown out the window, such as a large conference with participants all over Europe, a summer trip to Kazakhstan, and also many events in the context of the associations 35th anniversary, organised by a committee that I was responsible for.

Despite all these setbacks, the pandemic — surprising as it may sound — offered some opportunities as well. Like everything at this point, member recruitment had to be done almost entirely in the virtual realm, asking us to invest in our online presence. The result was a set of two promotional video’s, a re-design of the website, and the creation of a Wikipedia page (which sadly was taken down by Wikipedia moderators two years later).

In short, my board year was an amazing and surprising experience full of fun adventures, unexpected turns, and lots of personal development. It is now that much clearer to me why so many people would delay their studies for something like this, that I enthusiastically recommend it to all students out there.

About the image:
The header image shows ‘Aurorae’, the 39th board of AEGEE-Leiden, a few weeks prior to the start of our term. The photo was taken by Wilke Geurds.