By Yasmine Wiersema
Renske is in her second semester at UCR, currently majoring in Cognitive Science. She is originally from Rotterdam, and, bonus points, she has a hamster (“But don’t tell Villex…”). According to her, the things you will remember from your student days are the things you did outside of class. She wants to make it her task to accommodate for your greatest RASA memories. In other words, she wants to give back to the community that made her feel at home the moment she arrived here.
Is Renske ready to be Secretary?
She describes herself as someone who is very actively engaged with the RASA community, someone who you can always see around on campus. She really wants to stress that her being in her second semester does not mean she does not have experience: after becoming a partner of a company founded in 2013, she has been working as an administrator for them, doing the kind of jobs a RASA Secretary would have to do. Part of this is about making sure everything is organized and e-mails are answered. She also works as a copywriter, writing texts for websites, meaning she knows how to communicate a message properly. She is currently CURA Secretary and she is also involved in a variety of other societies.
Renske says she is “very devoted and would never give up, despite bad days, because [she is] doing this for the community.” She wants to open up the community more to people who are perhaps not very outgoing and who would not enjoy, for example, all the drinking and forced socializing during IntRoweek. A nice example of a more easy-going, relaxed event would be the slumber party. She wants to take care of the entire community.
Every secretary-to-be always wants to focus on improving communication. Renske wants to work on other ways of getting information across, for example by increasing traffic on the RASA website and the official Facebook page, as the newsletter still is not read by enough people and posts in Facebook groups become buried very quickly. With the skills she gathered in her other jobs, she should be a suitable candidate to do this. Finally, she would like to see more inter-UC activities happening because this is a great way of getting out of the UCR bubble and to get to know other people with other ideas and talents.
Something Renske stresses is that all she wants to do is “continue the upward trend, as the current RASA board is doing an amazing job already”. She explains that her ‘mission’ is summarized in her slogan: “Your voice, my signature. That is the reason why I’m running. I want to represent the people here and give back to the community that has already given so much to me.”
Yasmine Wiersema, class of 2015, is an Earth- and Computer Science major from Gouda, The Netherlands
