Board 25 Signing Off !!!

Aditya Parulekar, Chair (2019-2020)

A little over 25 years ago, a group of students from Building Technology started a student association for their master track. They called it “Praktijkvereniging BouT” and aimed to connect students with the industry. Now, two and a half decades later, BouT has grown into a professional student association with well over a hundred active members, including students, professors, staff and alumni. We, the 25th board of BouT, together with all our committee members, have had the opportunity to take the association through its silver jubilee this year. It has been a year filled with some great highlights for the BouT community, such as the hit-welcome party and BBQ hosted with our honorary BouT member Marcel Bilow in September; the adventurous study trip to Zurich and Basel where we visited our peers at the ETH Zurich in November; the highly anticipated EMERGEN|SEA| symposium on Aquatic Architecture hosted by BouT in February; as well as the many inspiring lunch lectures and company visits which were made possible by our industry partners this year. But also, the occasional student walking into the BouT office for a chat or a coffee break is much cherished by us. The door is always open!

The year of the jubilee also brought exciting new things for the association, such as the monthly newsletter, the Building Technology sweater, the special edition Rumoer XXV and the inception of the BouwHouse platform. BouwHouse, which is a collaboration platform for student associations, was initiated by BouT to promote the collaboration between the different master disciplines of the faculty of Architecture of TU Delft.

The development of worldwide Pandemic since the last few months has been very saddening and has had a big impact on everyday life for everyone. Due to the measures in place, all planned BouT activities and events leading up to summer 2020 are postponed until further notice. In these times of social distancing and isolation, we hope everyone is safe and can continue their lives from their homes. We would like to use BouT as an online platform where we can arrange Friday afternoon drinks on Zoom and perhaps stream a lunch-lecture from one of our industry partners right to your kitchen table. Let’s get through this together!

We wish it would have been under better circumstances that we could pass the baton to board 26. However, we have full confidence the new board is up to the challenge of leading the association through these turbulent waters. Board 26 will be taking over from April onwards and will continue right where we left off.

Board 25 would like to thank all the committee members of BouT who put in their efforts for the association, the professors who support us, the other student associations we teamed up with this year and the industry partners we work with. Finally, I would like to say that it has been a really big pleasure to be part of the board with Divyae, Kees, Tarang, Tom, Prateek and Yarai. This really is a team that can work hard & play hard. I’m sure, wherever they will end up working, they will put a smile on the faces of their co-workers.

And with that said, Board 25 out.

By Aditya Parulekar, Chair (2019-2020)