If everything goes as planned, I’ll stay here until I retire
“What I find important in life is to balance work - the way to make a living - with personal development and my family. I found that balance here, at the VUB. Simply because I can spend the weekends at home. Before this, I worked in the media for 25 years as a video engineer and director at Medialaan [now DPG Media - Ed.]. That was generally until 12 at night, Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, Christmas, New Year's Eve, ... Now I can tell my family every weekend: "Look, I'm available!" I recently came to the VUB as a team leader at AV Services. They provide technical support for the classrooms, logistics for events, and the production of videos for social media and so on. When I left Medialaan, I hadn't dared to hope that this job would come out of thin air: holidays, autonomy, etc. It's only a very short time that I've been here, but yesterday we had our first graduation ceremony, for teacher training. It was wonderful to see how the efforts of all the people on my team coincided, and how it went without a hitch. That was perhaps the most beautiful thing I've experienced here so far. If everything goes according to plan and I continue to enjoy myself as I am now, I will stay here until my retirement.”
On the occasion of the VUB’s 50th anniversary, prof. dr. Martina Temmerman asked the students in her introductory course on journalism genres to make portraits of people on the VUB campus. The ‘snapshots’ resulting from the project “Humans of the VUB” offer a lovely cross section of life on our university campus in 2019/20.