The freelancer’s club

The Freelancer’s club. That’s the term we coined for our club of unemployed or rather self-employed (with no income) graduates. We have a radically free approach to our introductory meetings, much different than the Dutch-style interesseborrels. If you’re lucky, you might bump into one of us at someone’s graduation party. Lately, many fortunate grads celebrated their graduation parties at Bebop, and they were directly infused into our club. Although there’s an economic slowdown, our club is always hiring.
During our informal meetings, there’re plenty of opportunities for you to ask us questions about your future prospects and roles. But newcomers must buy drinks in honour of the older club members, a handful of creative, freelance engineers.

So, did you think your next step after graduation was to prepare for job interviews? Hang on. Your Duwo housing contract is over and it’s now time for more important interviews – instemmingen. This is planet Delft, so don’t worry that you’re inconveniencing your friend at whose place you’ve been staying ‘temporarily’ for the past couple months. Freelancing here is all about feeling free to ask and feeling free from shame.
That’s the first step. Later, as you’ll discover, freelancing is a great opportunity to finally liberate yourself from society’s conventional boundaries and step into the great unexplored. Freelance jobs include, but aren’t limited to, delivering mail, ripping off old furniture, driving delivery vans and plucking tomatoes in sweaty greenhouses.

If you like charity and donation, you, my fellow freelancer, can also help your lagging-behind pals graduate by making illustrations for their reports, making prototypes of their products or simply preparing their presentations. But do make sure you talk to them about joining the Freelancer’s club soon. During one of our recent brainstorming sessions, we enterprising club members came up with another grand idea: donating at the sperm bank. What a productive initiative.

Or were you a sophisticated, high-grade student nerd? If so, start a blog and fill it with information you gather from haunting the many (free) symposiums happening at TU. Thank you internet. It doesn’t matter if it’s a symposium on sustainability or usability, just as long as you can also get free drinks and snacks there. Yes, ‘free’ is the most important word in the Freelancer’s club.
So don’t worry if you don’t find a prospective employer. Be self-employed. It’s that simple. Many of our club members are now taking up the mantra: Start up. Yes, start your own company (with no investment of course and more probably no income). Plenty of creative ideas come up during our brainstorming sessions. After all, as engineers we learnt this long ago: Necessity is the mother of invention. 
Remember, freelancing means total freedom. It means becoming self-dependent, self-employed (with no income) and self-occupied, in order to avoid becoming insanely self-indulgent.

This year’s TU Delft honorary guest writer is Douschka Meijsing, a famous author of world repute. She’s won many a prize, her work has been translated from Dutch into a handful of other German dialects. Personally I have never read any of her celebrated works, but hey, that’s just poor old illiterate me. My preferred medium of fiction is Donald Duck magazine, so in an attempt to bring out my better self, I took a shortcut through the internet and checked out a youtube video that Ms Meijsing made in honor of her latest work. It has received a staggering total of 452 hits. Whooff! Never in my wildest dreams did I think that there were more than a hundred Dutch pensioners surfing the net. Probably some Sunset Old Age Home got online 😉
Douschka Meijsing will be teaching a masterclass on memory. She’s going to explain why search engines like google ruin our mental health, since they store all the facts so we don’t have to use our brains anymore. Duh, whatz your doin storing your yada yada on youtube, mam? Personally, I am weary of writers coming to Delft every year, teaching us why engineering sucks, their only expertise being a handful of books written in a petty language sold to a dementing part of society. Maybe that is why these writers teach their class in Dutch instead of English. IT’S A MASTERCLASS, ENGLISH IS MANDATORY. Well, if it’s a guest writer, keep it low, keep it Dutch, better not spread the word around.
Why does our Dean invite a writer every year? I mean, what is the added value? Is this supposed to be a creativity booster for our dull mechanical minds? If it is all about creativity, why not invite a painter, or better still, a ballet dancer? It would be so much more fun to see our engineering students hopping about, freaking nerds in pink tutus, improving their technique.
Yo, Dean, seriously man, Fokkink to Fokkema, cut the crap and invite a genuine celebrity that will rock everybody’s pants off: invite Paul Krugman. Start afresh next year and make Ms Meijsing a final tribute to a dying art form in a language that will soon be extinct. Into oblivion.