Memorias de Holanda

Hello people!

This is Laura from Holland! As you know, four students from Mondragon TA came to Holland for one month to start with an amazing project: HollanDream.

One ordinary day, we were in Oñati and a man called Patrick came to share something with us. We were surprised. He wanted people ready to work in Haarlem Team Academie helping them spreading TA spirit there and catching new penguins for the starting degree of LEINN the next September. We sent the application and fortunately here we are, in the beautiful city of Haarlem, Amaia Giralt, Jon Arana, Aritz Pagola and I.

The experience is being fantastic and it’s also a good point that we four are from different teams, so we can enrich each other. We are living in a big house with Ananda, our host. Even if the first days we were frozen without the heating, now we are a happy family.

Regarding to the project we are working together with four Dutch guys from TA so they can help us with the process. They are very kind an friendly. Here Team Academie is very different from Spain. There are two different ways to be in TA. One is the vocational level, which is for younger people, and the other one is bachelor level. This second one is the similar one to our degree, but it’s not exactly the same.  We are learning a lot, and we are trying to keep in touch with our teams as much as possible, because we are noticing that communication is really important so we can stay in the team even if we are not there.

Yesterday we had the first Workshop in one school in Zantvoort, near Haarlem. We first did one “exam” (as they did last year in Ametsen Ekaitza) and the students were very lazy. We suddenly said that was a joke and we started with our presentation of TA and the Speed Prototyping. We explained the international part the most and people seemed to be interested. For the Speed Prototyping we propose a funny game. We gave the students five famous brands and they had to create a new product in this brand (like Apple or Zara). Everyone was very creative. For example, some girls created one Chanel night mask with integrated mp3-headphones to hear music. Furthermore we also have a contest for the students we visit. Each one of them can write an inspiring sentence related with TA and this sentence will be the slogan of one T-Shirt. The winner of that sentence will get a MacBook Air. So this was very motivating for them and they were “rebanándose los sesos” just because of the prize (yo si que me he rebanado los sesos para encontrar la expresión en inglés, es que “slide brains” suena un poco turbio e Andoni). Here you have some pictures of the workshop:

 

 

So, this is it people.

Best regards to Smash and Glow,

@laura_estankona (Estakontxa para los amigos).