Education, Organisation
Archaeology Student Assessor Imen el Idrissi reflects on the upcoming academic year
For the past academic year, I’ve had the great opportunity to work as the Student Assessor in our Faculty Board, and I’m delighted to be able to continue for one more year. A big benefit of being able to continue, is that I’ll be able to continue with everything I worked on last year.
Within the Faculty, for example, I’ve worked with Micaela de Vries on bringing back student panels to evaluate the cohesiveness and balance of our Bachelor curriculum, which we hope to start in the upcoming year. Additionally, I’m excited to see whether the new BA thesis process that was designed last year will help both students and staff with the problems they’ve encountered with the old BA thesis process. I will also be continuing to work with the event committee to organize the Faculty’s opening of the academic year and other events throughout the year.
Next to that, I have been and will continue to be a point of contact for our students; I certainly don’t know all the answers to your questions, but by now I know where to find most of them, and I understand that it’s sometimes easier to approach another student than a teacher. You can send me an e-mail at assessor@arch.leidenuniv.nl.
Of course, I will also be starting new projects. I will be working more closely with Alex Geurds, our vice-dean of education, specifically to look at and renew the Faculty’s long-term vision on education, and the future of our masters’ program. This will undoubtedly be a bigger project involving many more people and lasting more than just one year, but I’m very excited to help make a decent start.
Lastly, towards the end of 2023-2024, we will be looking for the next Assessor, and I will help train them for their upcoming term. All in all, though it might be a fairly simple answer, I will be doing much of the same as I have done so far, with an added focus on education and our master’s program. From September onwards, I’ll also start my own MA (the Heritage and Museum Studies track), and I figured I shouldn’t start the year off too ambitiously. That is just the plan I have now, however, and I’m sure the upcoming year will surprise me as much as last year has.