The candidate you elected as your councillor
for the academic year 2020-2021: Thomas Vaessen
Meet NovUM’s candidates for the University Council
and read what they stand for!
Manifesto 2020
Dear fellow students,
We are proud to be running for university council. Amongst our group, we share several years of council experience backed by a 17-year-old student representative party!
We, NovUM, want to have free coffee at all faculties! Coffee makes us concentrate better and boosts our energy. Our proposal is to require the next caterer to provide a ‘bring your own cup’ (BYOC) free coffee service.
This year has been a tough one. First the cyber-hack, and then the covid-19. Maastricht University has a great cyber- and ICT team, where we would like to benefit from! We should be prepared for a potential extension of online education and as such we will ensure that it’s optimized.
We think that it would be great to offer an integrated application for all students to make it easier to access all announcements, documents, test results, and stay connected with other students! We propose to have an integration of the student portal, MyUM and webmail in one comprehensive, reliable and user-friendly platform: the StudentApp.
As six candidates hailing from six different backgrounds NovUM shows its diversity. Just like NovUM Maastricht University is known for its international character! We believe that the University shouldn’t just promote acceptance of international students, but have a real all-inclusive community. International students should have a platform by promoting the use of the English language.
Although we have great international relationships, we would much like to work on creating relations with other faculties in and outside Europe. This will make it easier for all students to go on exchanges or internships abroad! This will also honour us with even more international students. Although this is great, more students in Maastricht means a greater need for housing. Housing is a thing where the university should do more to ensure accessible and affordable housing!
Novum believes in a sustainable future! We believe that there are practical investments that can be made to ensure a sustainable university. One such suggestion is to work with the course coordinators to reduce paper waste and to do more recycling, offer more vegan food options, organize climate awareness weeks with fun activities, and more educational initiatives to promote sustainability, such as a cross-faculty minor. Additionally, pushing for more use of digitalization is another way to tackle the problem of paper waste. We are also pushing for high-grade improvements, such as an energy neutral and zero-waste Tapijn Kazerne. We are happy to announce that there are more programmes
We need YOU to make this all happen! We believe there should always be ways for students to express their opinions and vision for Maastricht, whether it be in the form of a townhall, accessible communication channels, or a student ideas competition. NovUM will continue to push for more student project crowdfunding to ensure financial limitations do not hinder student initiatives.