‘Place people where they excel’

He never expected to stay at the UT for so long. But he enjoyed the academic atmosphere as well as the freedom to arrange his work as he saw fit while having the space to follow his interests. Lo and behold: fifteen years after graduating, Jordy Gosselt can still be found on campus, feeling right at home as the programme director of Communication Science.

To bring out the best within his programme, he has given staff with a strong affinity for teaching the room to excel at it - in consultation with the department chair. ‘Previously, as an academic, you had to be able to do everything if you wanted to move up the tree: bring in research money, teach well, carry out management tasks and make a social impact. But in my opinion, you need to place people where they can excel.’

In his early days on campus, he himself was not immediately happy with his division of labour either. ‘As a PhD student, you spend four years doing research while about ten per cent is spent teaching. So then, for example, you supervise a few undergraduate students with their thesis. I wanted to do more teaching. After two years, I had my contract changed and that amount of teaching doubled.’

So he also worked with his colleagues to tailor tasks. ‘That created a certain relief. People can now focus on what they are good at. Although I do think that all teaching staff should continue to do research and vice versa. After all, that is the basis.’

To give that a new impulse, Gosselt would like to see the wall between the social and technical disciplines within BMS and UT-wide to be broken down further. ‘We talk to each other. On topics like energy transition or AI, we can find each other very nicely, and all kinds of nice cross-pollinations are arising.’