What is a Scintilla Committee and Why Should You Join One?

While the first (non-online) year of university almost always comes with many unique opportunities, each study usually has its own special perks. For EE, one of these perks is Scintilla, the Electrical Engineering student association. As a new student this year (or a returning second-year), you get the chance to become an active member of the association and join one of Scintilla’s many committees - but what does that even mean?

Put simply enough, a committee is a team; it is a group of people with a common cause which can range from organizing events and excursions to writing articles, and much more. Being part of a committee means you learn from all of the people around you, try out all sorts of different skills, and make new friends along the way as well. Now that we know what a committee is, let’s go through a few examples of the ones you can join, and maybe even figure out which one‘s for you.

SCALA - Scintilla’s Committee for All Likable Activities organizes fun, interesting and exciting activities for the members of Scintilla. SCALA organizes events such as the yearly Christmas dinner, LAN parties, scavenger hunts and summer BBQ’s.

LEX - Scintilla also has a more business related side, the Lecture and Excursion (LEX) committee operates in this field. They contact companies to organize lunch lectures, in which a company talks about what they do. LEX also organizes excursions to companies such that students can get to know a company by seeing it from the inside.

VAUXHALL - VAUXHALL is a committee that shows appreciation to the educational staff of Electrical Engineering. They gather votes from the students on who is the best teacher, through these votes they nominate the best teachers with an interview and elect the Teacher of the Year in a flamboyant award ceremony.

De Borrel - Some activities go paired with a drink in one of the drinking rooms in the Zilverling, De Borrel is the guild of drafters that ensure that drinks are served. Whenever the drinking room is unoccupied, a few drafters might take the opportunity to set up a bizarre theme drink.

Scrapheap - Instead of organizing a couple activities in a year, some committees are focussed on organizing one grand activity. One of those committees organizes the Scrapheap Challenge: a yearly event in which teams of engineers are tasked with developing a robot or device that can fulfil one specific task given by the committee. The teams then have a couple of days to create the best end product, which will then compete against the other teams in a grand finale.

DIGI - Scintilla is becoming a larger association every year, and the digital systems that belong to the association have to grow with them. DIGI is the collection of committees full of tech-savvy members that manage and develop digital systems of the association.

And these are just a few of the committees within Scintilla. If you are interested in becoming an active member, make sure you visit the committee market, in which committees looking for new members will present themselves and people get the opportunity to join them. The committee market will take place on September 29th in SmartXP: come by to enjoy some free Subway lunch and have a chat with the active members of Scintilla! In case you have any questions about becoming an active member, you can always get in touch with the Commissioner of Internal Affairs by sending an e-mail to intern@scintilla.utwente.nl or come by the Scintilla Room and ask a board member.

If you’re still on the fence, take it from the first-hand experience of an active Scintilla member whom we briefly interviewed:

We’ll wait for you at the committee market, and hopefully see more of you after that as well!