By Kirsten Kapteijns
Wednesday morning all the students gathered for their hangover tutor breakfast. After a few hours, with a full stomach, having met their tutor, and received their brand new schedules, all of them walked together to the Hofpleinkerk for their very first General Assembly. Slowly the flock of yellow shirts moved inside, to find neatly arranged chairs with little pieces of paper on them. Once they sat down, some with a confused expression looked at the paper RASA chair Fenna opened the Introduction GA. With the example of the agenda the approve/disprove/abstain voting was explained and the GA was good to go.
The RASA community was creatively explained with a, to stay in theme, Greek temple and students found out what exactly the word entablature meant, when Fenna pointed out all the parts of the temple. The biggest part of the GA was dedicated to the pillars of our community: the societies and teams. Our three lovely CAO’s, Bara, Mark and Jane, introduced all the societies shortly but sweetly and finally the purpose of the little pieces of paper became clear; they were voting ballets. To further explain closed voting to the new students, all of them were asked to vote for their favourite societies. These votes would be used later to place everyone with the societies of their liking in the societies event. After Fenna called emphatically for everyone to remember to put their name on the paper and the independent body handed out some much needed pens, the voting was successful and the students were one step closer to having experienced their first GA.
The time had come for the open floor and a motion was presented: there needed to be more introduction GA’s. Clamor arose amongst the students, but an amendment was shortly added: there needed to be 42, which is off course the answer to everything, introduction GA’s every semester! More hubbubs arose and the amendment was put to a vote. A bit hesitant at first but with a little incentive from Fenna’s side the new students decided the amendment was not as good an idea and disapproved it. More confident in their second vote they approved the motion and RASA was now fully assured the students had become experienced GA’ers. And so ended the very first GA of the class of 2018.
Kirsten Kapteijns Class of 2017 is a science major from Lage Mierde the Netherlands.
