A short while ago, I was removed from a group because of my non-Dutch name. It made me wonder: is this just the way things are, or can the TU/e encourage more inclusive group formation?

The introduction of Challenge-Based Learning, together with the growing student population at the TU/e, has strengthened the role of group work as an essential part of our education. It prepares students for a future of teamwork, with all the interpersonal challenges that come with it.

Many students choose the familiar route: working with people they already know or with friends from previous project groups. But what if you don’t know anyone in your cohort? In my Computer Science program, we’re usually free to form our own project teams. I often see this freedom leading to homogeneous groups made up of a single nationality or gender. It’s completely human; it feels comfortable and efficient. But it creates a glaring contradiction between our educational philosophy and what actually happens in practice.

Various studies show that teams composed of people with diverse backgrounds, nationalities and genders perform better and are more productive. They challenge one another’s thinking and arrive at more robust solutions. By accepting homogeneous groups as the norm, we undermine both the social experience and the academic rigor of our projects. We prepare students for a global, multicultural job market with a narrow, monocultural team experience.

When I started a project a few weeks ago, my teammates assumed I didn’t speak Dutch because of my foreign-sounding name. They removed me immediately, without asking a single question, and replaced me with someone they knew could speak Dutch.

This loss of potential — even if not intended to be harmful — meant I missed an important learning opportunity for my future in the Netherlands: gaining experience in a Dutch team setting. Dutch isn’t my first language, but I now speak it fluently and wanted to gain more experience working in Dutch-speaking groups during my master’s program. If my name alone is enough to exclude me from a simple project, is this just coincidence, or a sign of what’s to come?

Your name should never be a barrier to learning. Full professor Alexander Serebrenik of Mathematics & Computer Science says that the TU/e’s diversity landscape is broad, but fragmented. Under his leadership, research is being conducted on diversity in a software engineering context.

Serebrenik emphasizes, however, that this is a matter of cultural change — a process that is typically slow and whose progress is difficult to measure. It’s easy to get lost in this issue, and diversity is a continuous, iterative conversation that has no purely technical solution.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to take away anyone’s freedom of choice. I simply want diversity and inclusion to be at the heart of our conversation about education. By consciously aiming for more diverse groups in our projects, we can achieve better results and create a richer and more connected study experience for everyone. For a university striving for a leading, global role in education, this is a test we cannot afford to fail.

Samir Saidi is a first-year master’s student in Computer Science at the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science. The views expressed in this column are his own.

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