Kick-In 2020: Shockingly High Potential Despite Virus
In memory of my own fantastic but exhausting Kick-In, I enlisted early on. I wanted to relive the experience, next to continuing the (yet) short-lived legacy of HIGH POTENTIAL. Although Jonas and I had a lot of fun during this year’s Kick-In, it was quite different from what we signed up for…
Origin Story
First off, it might be good to know some background info. Jonas and I were to continue our fresh, new do-group into it’s second generation. It was started by Geert and Floriaan last year, where HIGH POTENTIALs “place” within the Scintilla do-group lore would soon appear to be one that would be at most of the activities during the day, and the surviving members would join other do-groups and continue the evening that way. It was a very nice way of meeting more people then just your own do-group. Jonas and I ended up being the only members who volunteered to start a new generation. As we have seen in the do-group family article from Matthijs (read about it here), there were a lot of do-groups who lived for just one generation. We wanted HP to be an everlasting do-group, so we felt responsible to continue no matter what.
Figure 1: The original generation of HIGH POTENTIAL
The expectation of the Kick-In got dimmer by the month. After Corona hit, we could still be optimistic that it would all be over by August. Typically, we were wrong. There still were considerable measures taken during the Kick-In, so that the new strategy for the Kick-In Committee was to go largely online. There still were the so-called “workshops” from sports associations, for which any do-group was allowed enlisting for 3 of them.
On the day the Kick-In officially started, we still hadn’t had a single thought that we might not have a do-group this year. There were a lot of new do-groups started, in anticipation of the larger group of fresh EE students that were expected due to corona. Because we already were from a first-generation do-group, we were certain that we would have an EE do-group.
Übberraschung!
I got a call from the Kick-In committee, telling me that HP would be just short of having an EE do-group. However, we were determined in creating another HP generation, so we agreed to having a do-group from a different study. Fortunately, it ended up being the right decision.
Saying that our kiddos’s study is not really related to EE, is quite an understatement. Psychology is probably the study with the least amount of commonalities with Electrical Engineering. This was a great opportunity for Jonas and I to meet some people outside of our studies who simply have very different values and a view on the world, which we already discovered the evening we met with our kiddo’s.
Psy kiddo’s think way bigger. They were not afraid to talk about serious topics and worldwide issues, where we used to talk about specific devices and certain developments within the EE realm of course. It was really refreshing to talk about topics that I do think about a lot, but didn’t really talk with others about.
The Corona Kick-In
Our week generally looked like the following. We tried to organise some activity during the day, and afterwards we would try to go chill in a different park everyday.
Figure 2: One of the workshops we did during the kick-in; playing beach-handbal.
Wednesday evening, we met online, and afterwards we met in the Volkspark for the first time. Thursday, playing handball at noon, and afterwards we went to Rutbeek because the weather was really nice out. We played a couple games of Flunky Ball with another Psychology kiddo’s, Elco (Elcohol) and the Electrocuteers. Afterwards, some joined us to the city centre to finish the night.
Figure 3: Having a few beers at Friends.
Friday morning a city tour was on the planning, we got ourselves some lunch there and went to chill in the Volkspark again, where we met with Annie and Perry. Afterwards we had dinner at my place and went back to the Volkspark to meet up with some other do-groups as well there. By this point, the Volkspark had been appointed as 2020’s Vestingbar.
Saturday we had a windy and cold campus tour, everyone was pretty tired of course (Kick-In as usual). We got some rest, and at 18:00 we could get a good Domino’s pizza deal at campus. We chilled in the G.J. van Heekpark, which also was nice for a change.
On Sunday we went rowing at Euros, fortunately just in-between the soft rains. We really tried hard, even had a race, so much so that we needed some pannenkoeken at my place to refuel. The pannenkoeken were the same, but the toppings were another controversial topic. For the last night of the general Kick-In, we wanted to end with a bang. We had dinner at McDonalds (not sponsored), drank some wine along the way (shoutout to Jannick) and had a few beers at Friends again. We looked around in the Volkspark, but most of the other do-groups were already finished. A friend of mine had a small party, where we ended the night, and with that, the Kick-In.
