First years who will be taking part in the next edition of INKOM will have quite a lot of input. Before they start, they can use a digital decision tree to indicate their preferences. Do you like sports? Parties? Culture? Tick a box. By the end, there are ten different groups. What follows are the mentors’ ‘sales pitches’ (picture plus text), after which the INKOM participant has to make a final choice.
Mentors are senior students who volunteer their time. Some are members of a student association, such as Tragos and Saurus, others belong to an independent student society, student drama club, or sports club, and yet others are completely ‘unaffiliated’.
For decades, the application process didn’t use a decision tree; new students were assigned to a ‘mum’ or ‘dad’. Sometimes it was a good match, sometimes it wasn’t, which resulted in groups splitting up very quickly. Not to mention that it was common knowledge that some participants were deliberately ignored by their mentors, simply because they didn’t fit the bill (i.e., didn’t want to become a member of their student association or society).
Up front
“We feel that the current mentor policy no longer matches the needs of the participants,” explained Jeroen Custers, INKOM project leader. The application system and “group forming process” have been examined closely and the policy has been revised for the coming academic year – the introduction period starting 18 August. As for Master’s students: “Last year we allowed them to choose whether they wanted a mentor or not.” That worked well and they will be offering that choice again this year.
But what if friends fill in the decision tree together and choose the same ‘safe friend group’? Surely that negates the idea that students should be meeting new people? Custers: “If participants wanted to stay together, they would change anyway. It is better to assign them together up front.”
Scaling up
INKOM is slowly being ‘revamped’. Last September, the Workgroup INKOM (WGI) was reduced from five to four students, and two professionals were added, university employees – Custers being one. According to Birgitte Hendrickx, deputy head of the Student Service Centre, that had to do with scaling up: “Things like permits, procurement and security could no longer be left up to the students,” she told Observant at the time.
The cantus also disappeared, a student party that centred around beer and Dutch music. The official reason: they didn’t want three identical evenings with the same music. A logical explanation would seem that Maastricht University – at which half the students are international and who might be less interested in Dutch student parties – felt this tradition no longer suited an introduction. Whether the cantus will be missing again in August is still unclear.
Hazing
Custers denies that the new mentor policy is related to the negative reporting about misconduct in student associations. Tragos was punished in 2023 – UM imposed sanctions on the association as a result of misconduct during its hazing. Earlier, a former member of Circumflex spoke out in Observant about hazing at that student association. He called on the university to change INKOM. “It’s the ‘fun’ associations and societies who get to provide the mentors and are thereby given free rein to recruit the newbies.”
According to Custers, the INKOM team thinks there “is room for improvement”.
He hopes everybody who wants to become a mentor signs up. “Because only if there are enough applicants, can we match the participants correctly.” However, this doesn’t mean that the committee will just accept any and all comers. “We will be looking critically at the quality.” He hopes to match international students to more internationally minded mentors. There are still too few of the latter.