Team Unicycle in action

4-5 days a week team Unicycle spends 6-7 hours in the IPMB office. They do research, prepare materials for the upcoming events and lectures, contact their clients and stakeholders and run the IPMB mailbox. But who are these “invisible” students, who are working so hard, who are the essential part of Windesheim Honours College? And what exactly are they doing?

IPMB, which stands for the International Project Management Bureau, is an office run by and for WHC students. This department was established in 2016 by the initiative of the College and its students. From that time on IPMB has proven that students themselves can do serious work and execute huge projects almost without any help from others. They are still showing great results in project management and running the whole department by their own. However, the help from their project coordinator and coach Suzanne Vink was important too. They were asked to be autonomous and proactive, but they had weekly (scrum) meetings with Suzanne to monitor the progress and receive indications.

In the spring semester of the 2018-2019 academic year IPMB is being run by two full-time Dutch students – Marthylan Fonk and Jente Witte, and Alessandro Manzoni – an exchange student from Italy.

During this semester team Unicycle is working on a bunch of projects, including organization of two Philosophical Science Cafes, doing research about WHC alumni policy and preparing a marketing plan afterwards, coaching first-year students, executing the Shelter City Exposition in collaboration with Justice&Peace and Zwolle Municipality, updating the IPMB Handbook for future IMPB teams and doing some unexpected tasks like helping with guest lectures promotion or making an overall view of clients evaluations for a research coach, Liesbeth Rijsdijk.

All these projects have to be executed by the team Unicycle itself like if its members were not students, but professional project managers or administrative workers. Moreover, for some projects they are playing a client role, while for others they are researchers, implementors or coaches. That is why we can say IPMB students are an intermediary between students and clients, which makes their place in the WHC structure difficult to be distinguished.

IPMB is a great reflection of what the “Dutch approach” to education is. Learning by working – that is what it stands for. However, the complete overview of advantages and disadvantages of this approach has not been created yet, that is why for many students it is still unclear how does IPMB work. In the following articles the mentioned overview will be provided and the question “It this system effective or not?” answered.