“What is it with everything in the Netherlands being needlessly complex?” my wife sighed once again, this time after I had just tried to explain how no-claims discounts on car insurance work in the case of a divorce. Not that we’re getting divorced—it just came up—but she did have a point.

At TU/e, too, just about everything is unnecessarily complicated. From education and organizational structures to the numbering of rooms—everything seems to be made as difficult as possible. Who, for instance, ever thought it would be a good idea to number rooms in MetaForum in an inward spiral, starting at number 59 in the southwest corner?

When it comes to organization, TU/e is the king of complexity. In my work, I’m managed by a supervisor, a program director, a handful of examination boards, a handful of program committees, scientific directors of institutes, and of course a dean.

All of them have different ideas about how I should do my job. This has grown organically over the past decades, but TU/e—unlike ASML—has yet to realize that having this many managers leads to an enormous amount of time being lost on producing reports.

The upside of this structure, by the way, is that I can pretty much do my job my own way. If anyone takes issue with that, I simply point to a random group and say, “they wanted it this way,” and there’s always some report—whether AI-generated or not—that supports that claim.

My son, who wants to study physics, has now also learned that everything here has to be as complicated as possible. He applied in Twente and in Eindhoven, just in case he can’t find a room in Enschede. At both institutions, he had to complete a ‘study choice check.’

In Twente, they asked him what his physics grade was, and that was that. TU/e, on the other hand, sent him an email with an image of a link. So he couldn’t just click it—no, he had to type it out. Behind that link was a massive questionnaire. “I really hope I can find a room in Twente, Dad,” he sighed. I hope so too.

Boudewijn van Dongen is a professor of Process Analytics at TU/e. The views expressed in this column are his own.

This column was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.