Jan Schiereck, staff member at TU Delft’s Innovation & Impact Centre, is concerned about his ‘colleagues and our working conditions’, he writes in this letter.
This is Vishal Onkhar’s last column for Delta. Writing has been good for him, but not always easy, he says. It often felt like a three-way wrestling match. Nevertheless, he expresses his gratitude to all of you readers.
Commissions to design public buildings often go through a tendering process. This system is bad for the architecture sector, particularly for those graduating and young architects. This should and must change, says Nima Morkoç, founder of the HA-HA Design & Development architect firm.
Let us stop acting as though the reports made to the Inspectorate of Education are exceptions in an otherwise pleasant community, writes Assistant Professor Marieke Kootte. “Correct anyone that says that ‘women are like numbers, they are pretty to play with’.”
The court proceedings TU Delft is considering in response to the Inspectorate of Education report seem more an attempt to put their own house in order than to address the underlying causes of the reports. You do not restore TU Delft’s good name in court, but by being an excellent employer, Dap Hartmann believes.
Student Mirte Brouwer is calling on TU Delft to support dual degree students. According to her, engineers who have undergone a broad education are highly valuable, but support from TU Delft for these students is very limited. The fact that top athletes, for example, do receive extra support proves that giving extra support would be possible.
Ethics is more than just a module on your timetable, says Applied Physics student Bas Rooijakkers. It is a learning process that lasts a lifetime and starts with the choices that we make today.
More than elsewhere at TU Delft, Architecture and the Built Environment understands what it means to have an academic attitude towards your discipline, Bob van Vliet discovered. This also implies that you explore things that are completely unrealistic in today’s society.
At the end of his contract, Vishal Onkhar reflects on what a PhD is really about. He realises the answer depends on when you ask the question: at the beginning, the middle, or the end.
