Between April 29 and May 5, the Blauwe Zaal of the Auditorium will be accommodating 250 European students for the ESTIEM annual meetings. It might sound like it’s a recipe for disaster, but it definitely isn’t, says TU/e student Stijn Zanders who’s responsible for the event’s promotion for the Eindhoven delegation: “There’s an agenda. People who have an interest in an issue are called forward. We vote by raising green and red sheets of paper. The audience has a voice too, of course, but the meetings are pretty well-organized.
Eindhoven and ESTIEM go back all the way to 1990, when a committee of student associations and other societies founded the network. By now, ESTIEM has branches at 68 universities in 27 European countries. According to the organization, 50,000 students are part of the network. Interactie has about 100 members; from the Netherlands, the universities of Enschede and Groningen will participate as well.