Annual Report 2017/2018

Merlijn van Montfoort - Chair Anna Immink - Secretary Robin Coesel - Treasurer & Vice-chair Nina Somer - Social Committee Affairs Officer Egbert Peppelman - Study Related Committee Affairs Officer Raz van Houts - Officer of Sales & Acquisition

Preface

After each academic year, the board of our association writes an annual report to look back on the year and everything that has happened concerning the VSPA. We also do this, by means of this document, the 77th annual report of the VSPA. The main goal of this piece is to inform members and future boards about the way our policy worked out.

The writing of this report was not possible without the support and feedback of our advisory bodies: the Supervisory Board (SB) and the Cash Audit Committee (CAC).

Of course, we cannot forget the contribution of our members. Members who have been in committees, administrative bodies or have invested their personal time in other ways for the association are the ones that have made the academic year of 2017/2018 ('17/'18) a wonderful year for the VSPA.

We thank you all very much for the efforts you put together for other psychology students.

Love,

The VSPA board of '17/'18

Merlijn, Anna, Robin, Nina, Egbert and Raz

Table of Contents

Preface 2 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 6

A. Focus Points 8 1. Accessibility 8 1.1. Internationalisation 8 1.2. Fractions 14 1.3. Tentafters 14 1.4. VSPA Offers 15 2. Career 17 2.1. Workshop Committee 17 2.2. Expansion Vacancies 18 2.3. Study Rooms 19

B. Committee Policy 21 1. Focus Points for all Committees 21 1.1. Accessibility 21 1.2. Transparency 22 2. Start-up and General 23 2.1. Start-up of the Committees 23 2.2. Functions within the Committees 23 2.3. Development within the Committees 24 2.4. Closing and Transmission 24 3. Role of the Board 24 4. Specific Committee Policy: Social Committees 25 4.1. Activities Committee 25 4.2. Borrel Committee 26 4.3. Party Committee 26 4.4. Gala Committee 27 4.5. Hitchhiking Committee 27 4.6. Music Committee 27 4.7. Skiing Committee 28 4.8. Sports Committee 28 4.9. Trip Committee 29 5. Specific Committee Policy: Study Related Committees 30 5.1. Altruism Committee 30 5.2. Career Committee 30 5.3. Conference Committee 31 5.4. Excursion Committee 31 5.5. Lecture Committee 31 5.6. Parent Day Committee 32 5.7. Study Trip Committee 32 5.8. Workshop Committee 32 6. Administrative Bodies 33 6.1. Supervisory Board 33 6.2. Cash Audit Committee 34 6.3. General Members Assembly Committee 34

6.4. Application Guidance Committee 34 6.5. Application Committee 35 6.6. First-year Coordination Committee 35 7. Facilitary Committees 36 7.1. Promotion Committee 36 7.2. Simmer Committee 39 7.3. Editorial Committee 40 7.4. Friday Afternoon Borrel Committee 40

C. Ongoing Policy 42 1. General Thank-yous 42 1.1. Weekend Getaway 42 1.2. Thank-yous for Active Members 43 1.3. Birthday Cards 43 1.4. Closing Borrel 44 2. General Members Assemblies 44 2.1. Tuesday, October 31, 2017 44 2.2. Tuesday, December 12, 2017 45 2.3. Tuesday, February 6, 2018 46 2.4. Tuesday, April 3, 2018 48 2.5. Tuesday, May 1, 2018 48 2.6. Tuesday, May 22, 2018 49 2.7. Monday, June 18, 2018 50 3. Former Members Reunion 52 4. VSPA Room 52 4.1. Opening Hours 52 4.2. Room Policy 52 4.3. Cleaning 53 5. Special Activities 53 5.1. Constitution Borrel 53 5.2. Committee Evening XXL 54 6. General Promotion 55 7. Website 55 7.1. Finalising Transition 55 7.2. Use of the Website 56 7.3. Attractiveness to Members 56 7.4. Maintenance 57 7.5. For the Future 57 8. Direct Debit 57 9. Storage Spaces 58 10. Insurances 58

D. External and Internal Contacts 60 1. External Contacts 60 1.1. Youtopia/New Partners 60 1.2. Establishment of Study Associations in the Netherlands 61 1.3. General Student Association Amsterdam 62 1.4. Studystore 62 1.5. Sports Psychology 64 1.6. Section Psychology Students of the Dutch Institute of Psychologists 64

2. Internal Contacts 64 2.1. Graduate School 64 2.2. Faculty Association of Social and Behavioral Sciences 65 2.3. Student Council Psychology 66 2.4. Faculty Student Council 66 2.5. Alumni Association Spectra 67 2.6 Programme Committee 67

E. Book Sales Policy 68 1. Book Sales in General 68 2. Promotion of Book Sales 69

F. Financial Policy 71 1. Introduction 71 2. Distribution Administrative Budget 71 3. Year Result 71 4. Explanation Income 71 4.1. Memberships 71 4.2. Interest Rate 72 4.3. Sales Study Material 72 4.4. Grants 73 4.5. Received Reservations 74 4.6. Sponsorships 74 5. Explanation Expenses 79 5.1. Association Costs 79 5.2. Postal Charges 81 5.3. Office Costs 81 5.4. Promotion 82 5.5. Investments, Depreciations and Reservations 84 5.6. Thank-you Gifts for (Active) Members 87 5.7. Committees and Administrative Bodies 90 6. Unanticipated Expenses 97 6.1. Unanticipated Expenses Annual Budget 97 6.2. Unanticipated Expenses Major Activities 97 7. Equity Capital 97 8. Debtors and Creditors 99

Appendix A: Translation List 100

Introduction

This is the 77th annual report of the Association of Psychology Students in Amsterdam (Vereniging van Studenten in de Psychologie te Amsterdam; VSPA). In this report the board of the academic year of '17/'18 will explain the ways in which the policy that has been determined in the policy plan was carried out. There will be outlined and evaluated to what extent the plans have been a success. We used the same titles as in the policy plan we wrote in the beginning of the year. On a practical note; at the end of this piece, you can find a list of translations to Dutch for names and terms related to the VSPA. Before we start, we would like to name a few things that have been characteristic for our year.

Generally speaking, we look back to a wonderful year in which we have learned a lot both as individuals and as a group. We started off with several ways to better get to know each other. For example, we had a ‘policy weekend’ in the Achterhoek (region in the eastern part of the Netherlands). This weekend has contributed a lot to our bonding within the board. Throughout the year, this bond helped us cope with the difficult and harder aspects of being in the board. This year, we also spent time together outside office hours or activities. And this report was partly written during another stay in the Achterhoek similarly to our policy weekend.

To provide a good overview of our development in this year, we can start by saying we were quite optimistic when we wrote our policy plan. We had many plans to make changes to the association and some might have been too hard to implement. During the year we learned to form a more realistic image of the means we had to make changes and manage the association. We think we have learned to be more critical about our own and each other’s work. The half-year result (HYR) was an exemplary moment in which we had to downscale our positive expectations about our policy. Yet, this was mostly financial. The following report will also evaluate the non-financial side to our policy plan.

Secondly, there were some difficulties and setbacks through the year. Due to the implementation of our new website, we have had quite some difficulties with it. It has been a topic in most of our board meetings throughout the year. There were also difficulties with the summaries and of course our troubles in the Lille trip cannot remain unmentioned. You can read more about these subjects in this report.

Another thing that has been characteristic to our policy is that we have been very keen to leave our mark on the association in the long-term. For example, we have done extensive research about the insurances and unanticipated expenses. We also suggested a lot of changes to the Standing Regulations (SR) such as a policy against drugs in the VSPA. Apart from these long-term adaptations we too focused on improvements on a shorter term, like the contract negotiations regarding partnerships for summaries and test trainings.

Of course we cannot forget to mention the activities that were organised this year. Characteristic for our year was that at most activities we were present in full muster as a board. Beside, many activities with registrations were filled really quick, which is something we think we can be very proud of. For a more nuanced image of our activities you can revert to the section of committee policy in this annual report.

Lastly, as you might have noticed, this report is written in English. We have put a lot of effort together to prepare the association and the board of 2018/2019 for the changes concerning internationalisation. Apart from essential aspects to internationalisation, like translating certain documents and the website, we also tried to create the right foundation for an bilingual future in which the VSPA can form a right platform for both Dutch students and students of other nationalities. As the last board to only have Dutch bachelor students, we wish the best of luck to the consecutive boards of the VSPA. We hope that the information in this report may help them with this hard but challenging task.

Much love, The 77th board of the VSPA Merlijn van Montfoort, Anna Immink, Robin Coesel, Nina Somer, Egbert Peppelman and Raz van Houts

A. Focus Points

1. Accessibility

In our policy plan we wrote about the importance of being accessible as a study association. The question was how to give access to VSPA’s services and activities to as many students as possible. Our general conclusion is that accessibility remains a very important subject for a study association. Whereas other student associations might use mandatory presence to have enough active members, we, as a study association, have to address other resources to provide VSPA’s services and activities to as many psychology students as possible. Although the focus on master students might not be the best way to expand our accessibility, our other initiatives have predominantly been successful. For a more detailed view on both things that went well and things that could have been done better, read the section below. We will start by talking about accessibility for international students. After that, we will write about accessibility for first-year students. Lastly, we explain how we focused on the accessibility for members in general.

1.1. Internationalisation As you all know, starting in the academic year of 2018/2019 the Bachelor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) will be bilingual. This will mean that not only Dutch students can follow the lectures and tutorials, but also students of other nationalities. Another reason for our focus on international students, was the amount of international master students, that has also been growing in recent years. Below we will tell about the gathered information on preparing the association for a major change such as the internationalisation of the Bachelor. Furthermore we will tell about what we did for the practical changes concerning internationalisation. Finally, we will tell about the things we did within our ‘own interpretation’ of internationalisation.

1.1.1. Information Collection To prepare the association as well as possible for the changes as a result of internationalisation, we found it very important that we gathered enough information on the subject. To do this we talked to a lot of people from different groups. The general conclusion is that the plans to talk to all those people were too elaborate. Because of this, quite some of the people we planned on talking to were not necessary. We already had the information we needed. Below we will still describe the useful conversations we did have about internationalisation.

First of all, we talked to UvA employees. For example, we received help from Eveline Zandvliet, policy employee of the Graduate School (GS), who told us about the way they dealt with the international students of the research master of psychology. She also came up with the idea of doing a buddy system. About this, we will write more below. The conversation with Eveline was very useful, because it gave us a good starting point for the information collection.

Other significant information came from different study associations that had already switched to an international association. For example, we had a meeting with Mercurius, the study association of communicational science. They told us about the necessary changes that have to be done, such as the translation of certain documents. We also spoke to Machiavelli, the study association of political science. They told us more about their implication of the buddy system. Both meetings were useful, because it gave us a clearer view of the practical matters that had to be taken care of when an association internationalizes.

Later in the year, we had meetings with the Faculty Student Council (FSC). With them and some study associations we evaluated how the buddy system worked for other studies. This has also added to the implementation of the buddy system to psychology.

Information about the developments concerning the Bachelor received from the Programme Committee (PC) was mainly brought to us by the CAC during board meetings. Because of Vincent Schreuder’s membership in both PC and CAC, it was easy for him to pass along this information. In our experience, this was a very useful way of receiving information about internationalisation, but also about other subjects concerning the programme.

Apart from the information collection as summed up above, there were no more meetings on the subject of internationalisation that were of significant use for our preparation of internationalisation. Associations such as Sefa, the association of Economics and Business economics, and Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Multicultural (AIM), the association of Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) have not been approach. Also the international associations that are part of the Establishment of Study Associations of Psychology in the Netherlands (ESAPN) have not been reached out to for this matter, because we did not find this necessary. After all, we had received enough information from the sources listed above.

1.1.2. Practical Changes The changes we want to implement can be divided into two aspects. On one hand there are some practical changes that ought to be made. On the other hand there are some ways of giving an own interpretation to internationalisation. In this part we will talk about the practical changes.

1.1.2.1. Translating Promotional Channels One of the practical changes that needed to be made is the translation of our promotional channels. For the website this meant that we wanted to implement a language switch, that makes it possible to switch between a Dutch and an English website. With financial help of the GS of psychology we bought a plugin (WordPress Multi Language; WPML) that made this possible. The actual translating of the website was done by us. For this we divided all of the content of the website among the board members. After that, Anna added the translations to the website. This whole process was completed in the last month of the academic year. Although it was quite some work, we still think it was not necessary to ask other parties, such as Et Cetera., UvA’s study association of English language and literature, to do this for us.

Before the multilanguage website was complete, we added a certain header to the main page of the website, titled “For international students”. International students were able to click this link and read a brief introduction about the VSPA and the services and activities that were accessible for internationals. Although we implemented this link quite early in the academic year, we do not think it was used often. After all, we only had international master students who generally were not interested in VSPA’s activities.

For promoting on Facebook our plan was to have each Dutch text followed by the English translation. By doing this we hoped to prepare the association on writing in English and we also hoped to reach some of the already existing international master students. This plan has not always been executed. It happened quite often that we forgot to add the English text or that committees did not translate their Dutch texts. Looking back, we think that we could have done more to adhere to this policy. On the other hand, we doubt about the added value of these translations. We have not had any reason to assume that master students have been reach by this promotion, because most events - even the English ones - were almost entirely attended by Dutch students. In our policy plan we choose not to do both Dutch and English texts on Instagram or Snapchat, because these texts are usually less meant to inform and more to entertain. Because of this they had to be brief. However, because of the massive growth of international students next year, we recommend to switch from Dutch to English on these platforms.

1.1.2.2. Translating Regulatory Pieces Apart from translating the promotional channels, we found it very important that the regulatory pieces, such as the SR and the Charter must be translated. Just like with the website, we received financial help from the GS to do this. They had these documents translated for us by one of UvA’s translating offices. The GS took full account of the expenses for this.

One thing that is important to mention is that the translations of these documents are not legally valid; only the originals are. The English versions simply remain translations. This is necessary because there might be some small errors in the translations of the translating office.

In our policy plan we did not expect to have our regulatory pieces reimbursed by the GS, which was why we planned to ask Et Cetera, the study association of English Language and Culture, to do this for us. In hindsight, we are very happy that one of UvA’s translating offices did this, because we are very happy about the result.

1.1.2.3. Other Practical Matters At last, there are some other other practical matters that needed to be taken care of. One thing is that we thought that there might occur some new problems with direct debit and international bank accounts. Machiavelli told us that they experienced problems with this. Below, under ‘C.8 Direct Debit’, you can read how this project turned out.

We also planned an optional General Members Assembly (GMA) in case that some changes need to be approved by the GMA. Eventually we planned this GMA on the 22nd of June. In this GMA, we voted about the English translations of the regulatory documents. For an overview of all subjects that have been discussed in the GMAs, you can go to ‘E. Ongoing Policy, 2. General Members Assembly’.

1.1.3. Own Interpretation Apart from the important practical matters we also focused on our own interpretation of the internationalisation. In this subject, we thought about what we would like to add to what the VSPA has to offer concerning accessibility for international students. We divided in (1) the current academic year and (2) the next academic year. Thirdly we will tell about what we did for the First-year Weekend (FYW), which entails both the current and the next academic year.

1.1.3.1. Current Academic Year We focused on the accessibility for master students in the current year. About the bilinguality of our promotional channels, you can read in the above. Besides we wanted to offer these students some English events. We offered some English lectures and the annual conference was also in English. Although the latter has been in English for a few years now. You can read more about these events under ‘B.5. Specific Committee Policy: Study Related Committees’. Our general conclusion about these events was that there were not many international attendees. So sadly, our goal to be more accessible for international master students was not reached in this sense. This can probably be attributed to the fact that master students are interested in more specific and more complex subjects, which are difficult to address because our accessibility for bachelor students should also be warranted. Apart from the anglicisation of certain events, we also wanted to promote the VSPA among international master students through their information days. We asked the Promotion Committee to do this, but in the end this did not work out as planned. You can read more about this under ‘B.7.1. Promotion Committee).

1.1.3.2. Next Academic Year Below we will talk about the preparations we did for next year concerning the own interpretation of internationalisation. Firstly, we talked to other study associations and they handled a committee policy in which any committee that contains one or more international members should switch to English. We would like to recommend this policy to the next board.

Apart from this point, we did a lot of research about the implementation of a buddy system. This started with the information collection as mentioned above in A.1.1.1. Information Collection. Both employees of the UvA and board members of international study associations told us that this is a quite useful tool to smoothen the integration of students from different nationalities. What it globally means is the following. Firstly, Dutch senior students can sign up to be a buddy for the international students of next year. Next, the international students can also sign up to be matched to a Dutch buddy. The next step, in the beginning of

next year, is that buddies are connected to the international students. These buddies can help the first-year students with questions they have about the city of Amsterdam or about studying at the UvA. It is also an option that there will be social events in which both buddies and first-year students can meet up with each other. This all has the goal to help the first-year students to get to know their environment better.

After the evaluation meeting we had with the FSC and some other study associations (also mentioned above), the FSC wrote an advice to the dean of our faculty in which they proposed to make the buddy system an integral policy for each programme that switches to be international or bilingual.

At the same time, we still had meetings with Eveline Zandvliet to think about a plan to best integrate international students and Dutch students. As a result of this Eveline set up a meeting with some people of the GS of Psychology who were responsible for the changes in the programme together with student representatives such as Ayra Gerlach, ombudsstudent of Psychology, but also with us, the VSPA. In this meeting and the meetings that came forth of this one, we focused on giving the international students a ‘soft landing’. The main point we focused on was the buddy system, which has been implemented in September 2018.

The buddy system will be evaluated by the next board. We can, however, say that we are very happy about the way our cooperation with the UvA employees worked out. Eveline was very keen to think with us about ways to offer the new students a soft landing and Rifka van der Meer was also very helpful in the practical implementation of the system.

1.1.3.3. Internationalising First-year Weekend In the prospect of the international pool of upcoming first-year students, we wanted to consider the changes it would generate for the weekend most of us have got to know and love. Early on in this project we realised there were not many things we, as the board, could do in this field. Mostly because the organization and coordination of this weekend is up to the First-year Coordination Committee (FCC). However, we did realize the uniqueness of the upcoming FYW and tried as much as we could to inform the FCC about the changes made to the Bachelors and the effect it would have on the weekend itself; e.g. a possible greater number of participants, change of the main language of the weekend, the importance of promotion in English, etc. This resulted in a motivated group of FCC members who are trying their absolute best to organize a weekend that is fun for students from all around the world. The senior students who partake in the organization as crew members are also well informed and are trying their absolute best to include every participant. The theme of the weekend this year “International holidays” is a great example of this effort, and the themes of the two parties that will take place that weekend “King’s Day” and “Carnaval” further prove the motivation to mix the Dutch culture with the cultures that the internationalisation will bring to the VSPA.

In our policy plan we wrote that we expected the number of senior students helping to organize the weekend would be bigger than last year, and that it might be necessary to look

into possible changes of the role of the mentors. The FCC did this and made some adjustments: in the previous years, each mentor was part of two different committees that were responsible for preparing different aspects of the First-year Weekend (e.g. the cooking committee, the cleaning committee, etc.); this year senior students applied for only one committee during the preparations of the weekend. These committees usually consisted of a small group of 5 people. During these preparations, each committee had to decide if their committee consisted of enough volunteers for their activities on the actual weekend or if they needed any extra volunteers: the so-called teams. After every committee decided this, the senior students signed up for the different teams they wanted to be part of. This meant that during the weekend they were helping not only their own committee, with whom they had prepared certain activities in advance of the weekend, but also other committees as a team-member during the weekend itself.

The evaluations of this different approach have not yet taken place, but one of the major changes this brought forward from an objective perspective is the time it saved senior students in the organisation of the weekend. Because they were only part of one committee before the weekend, compared to the traditional amount of two committees, this logically meant that it cost them about half the time. A possible consequence of this could be that the seniors could be more motivated in the organisation of their activities as they might have felt more responsibility over them. As mentioned, the evaluations have not yet taken place so the actual assessment of the effectivity of this change will probably be readable in the FCC transmission document or next year’s Annual Report.

Another First-year weekend related attention point we mentioned in our policy plan was the research whether there were any other alternatives to the location: De Hoof. De Hoof is a great location and they hold the VSPA very dearly as one of their oldest clients, the location keeps getting more and more expensive. For this reason, we decided to explore if there were other (cheaper) locations that would be suitable for the First-year weekend. We explored the internet, trying to find out were the other major Dutch study associations hold their First-year weekends, and came to one quite surprising conclusion: our First-year weekend is one of the biggest in the Netherlands. We could find no other study associations that have First-year weekends with nearly 200 participants. Besides that, we couldn’t find any other location that were suitable for this large number of students. We have sent a few emails to some locations and called with a few others. Our major conclusion of this attention point would be that even though De Hoof is getting more and more expensive. It is the most suitable location for a huge First-year weekend like ours.

Because of this conclusion, we did try to make a long-time agreement with De Hoof, where we would book the location for multiple years (usually we just book it two years in advance) for one stable price; for instance, we would book it for the next five years for the same price. However, De Hoof was not open for such an arrangement, the main reason being that this would be too far ahead in the future and that both De Hoof and the VSPA do not know whether the location or the association would still be the same.

If, anytime in the future, De Hoof would not be suited for the VSPA - due to the price, or the facilities - it might be still worth it to look into other options. Merlijn and Raz did the research this year, so they might be able to give you a few tips.

1.2. Fractions In our policy plan we wrote that we wanted to collaborate with the fractions on three points: communication about study related activities, sharing promotion channels and keeping an eye on each other's event schedules. The cooperation with the fractions has not been very successful this year. The fractions had some very enthusiastic students who were willing to cooperate, but eventually they did not have time for the VSPA.

We will now evaluate upon the three points separately. Firstly, there has barely been any contact between the fractions and VSPA’s study related committees. For example, only a few fractions came to the career day to talk about the career opportunities after finishing that specialization. However, a group chat has been created which made communication a little easier.

Secondly, the promotion channels have been exchanged sporadically; the fractions sometimes shared our events and sometimes we shared theirs. We did not see a big increase in the attendance of third-year students at the events the fractions had shared, so even when it happened it was not necessarily very useful.

Finally, the cooperation in terms of the event schedules. For this, Egbert created a google document. The idea was that both the VSPA and all fractions wrote down their events in that document. It was initially filled in by a few fractions, but this seemed to not really work out. Because we have different target audience, it would not really matter if two lectures by both VSPA and a fraction are organized in the same week.

We concluded that it is very difficult to cooperate with the fractions. The group chat works better than email, though. An advice to next VSPA boards, once the fractions are formed, have a meeting with them, tell them what VSPA has to offer them and see if they want to cooperate. If they do not take the lead, we would advise to let it rest.

1.3. Tentafters This year, we introduced tentafters as a way to represent and promote the VSPA and its board in an easy and approachable manner. The idea was to go to the exam halls after students of the first year took their exams, to offer them a beer after they had finished and to have a nice chat with them there. This way we hoped to expand our reach and meet students who, for instance, do not visit our borrels or comparative activities. To some extent, we think this goal was achieved. As described in our HYR, we had some trouble bringing the tentafters to a success at the beginning of the year. It is quite a time-consuming activity to move the crates of beer all the way to the exam halls which are in the southeast of the city, making it hard for us to find the motivation to go, and once there we found it hard to reach all the students and caught ourselves spending the most time with the people we already knew, rather than

effectively connecting with new people. However, after careful judgement towards the end of the first semester, we decided we wanted to continue with the tentafters, provided that we take them more seriously. Subsequently, we divided the remaining tentafters over all board members, and made sure we would put enough effort into them, for instance by always leaving on time. This had a positive effect, and put more structure into the tentafters. After some time, people recognized us as being from the VSPA, and were always happy to see us and have a little chat! In this way, we think we achieved our goal to become more known among all students and to portray ourselves as an accessible board. It was nice to see how happy you can make your members just by bringing them a drink after their hard work at their exam.

The tentafters were also a convenient place to hand out flyers or promote upcoming events in a casual way. On two occasions, we sold tickets to a VSPA party and this turned out to be quite effective.

In our policy plan we mentioned trying to schedule the tentafters in such a way that they would coincide with our Friday Afternoon Borrels (FABs). Unfortunately, in practice, this was not taken into account enough when making the planning of FABs, mostly because it was often not possible due to staff schedules. After all, the planning is made together with UvA staff, so it was important to match the FABs with staff schedules as well. We were not able to adapt the schedule of tentafters to that of the FABs, as tentafters have to be on the same day as exams and we obviously can not decide when those take place. We feel it was a missed opportunity, as we hoped to promote our FABs on these tentafters and we wanted to offer members the chance for a whole afternoon of fun after all the exam stress. If tentafters are continued in the future, we would advise giving it another try to combine these two events.

Concluding, we think tentafters are a really nice way to do something nice for your members. It is relatively easy and takes little to no preparation. It has some effect in promoting the VSPA and its board, and moreover it is a nice gesture to hard working students. This is why we were happy to try to make the tentafters work this year, especially in the context of our focus point accessibility. However, it is arguable whether the time it costs to make a tentafter work, even though it is not much (about three hours in total to do groceries, get to the exam halls, be there, return to the campus and return empty beer crates) is really worth it. The contact with students is friendly but short and we doubt if it really made an effect on inactive members. Considering this, maybe the board members would be better off using those three hours to work on other activities.

1.4. VSPA Offers In an effort to make a VSPA membership more valuable at the start of this year we decided we wanted to continue the project of VSPA Offers, a project that was was set up last year, but kind of stayed in the background. This year our goal was to further concretize the project to the point where VSPA members could benefit from several discounts at different locations throughout Amsterdam, just by showing a certain sticker on their student card. In line with

our policy plan, Raz used the first semester to gather at least six different companies who wanted to partake in this project and would offer our members a discount or special offer. By the end of the first semester some things were pretty clear:

Due to a wide variety of reasons (no interest in promotion options, conflicting contracts, other discount actions, etc.) the amount of companies interested in being part of the project considerably lower than we expected; we approached more than forty companies in the first semester, by February only six had given somewhat of an approval: Hotshots, Mama Dough, Burgermeester, De Havelaar, The Original California Burrito, Entrée (Concertgebouw) and Thuisbezorgd. Despite this being more than the amount needed according to our policy plan, it still did not feel quite right. For instance Thuisbezorgd only wanted to supply discount vouchers for one exam week and Entrée gave us 3 memberships to give away, so both were not offers for everyone to enjoy for the whole year. The other five companies did agree to partake but it was hard to keep the overview of the contact with each of them. It was a hard and chaotic job to keep in touch with all the different companies - to keep them updated with the project, and we never knew for sure if they had actually informed all of their employees to recognize the stickers and act accordingly.

It was also pretty hard to introduce the project to the students. By the time we started promoting it (the start of the second semester) it was hard to reach most of the students. At the end of the first semester we tried to excite students for the project by handing out Thuisbezorgd-vouchers in combination with a flyer which informed them about the project and the benefits it would bring. In the second semester we tried to post a weekly promotion post on our Facebook page introducing one of the companies and the discount they offered. In practice this too proved to be quite hard: like mentioned before it was hard to keep in touch with the companies. To illustrate: most of them agreed to partake somewhere in November, the actual project did not start before February. This means almost 4 months passed in the meanwhile. During this period we were so busy, it was nearly impossible to keep in touch. So, by the time the project actually launched, one of the companies had changed bosses, some did not remember agreeing and some did not even reply. This made it pretty unclear for us whether we were promoting offers to our members that they could actually benefit from or we were just making hollow promises. Sending the companies contracts, and having them sign them might have helped with this. But because of the hectic contact we had with most of the companies, we doubt most of them would get to signing it. The main problem of this hectic contact is that fact that both the VSPA, as most companies, have a lot of different affairs going on. This could mean that an email to them would not be answered for a month, or that we would forget answering their emails for a while. We believe this is the sad reality of being part of a busy association/company. Keeping your agenda tight, like having planned phone appointments, or fixed emailing days, might help with this though.

We wanted to hand out the stickers at our Tentafters, but due to the business of a board year, this was forgotten the first few Tentafters. For the reasons mentioned above, the last couple of Tentafters it was not really worth the effort anymore.

Although this project did not prove to be very successful this year, we are still quite confident that it could work. It did not take off the way we hoped it to, but the foundations were created to build on: there are still many stickers to prove one's membership, and there has been contact with some companies, a few of which were more excited than others. To make this project more successful we believe it is necessary to get students involved from the very first day. The VSPAquaintance could be a great place to inform new first years about the VSPA Offers and the benefits it offers to members of the association. Also, the more companies get involved, the more companies want to get involved. This sounds like a complicated paradox, but it’s the truth. A common question companies asked when we approached them was “which companies are already in?”. If you have a nice looking list of partaking companies, more companies will be eager to join. Although we did not get as many companies involved as we hoped to, we started with nothing and were still able to collect a group of companies who expressed their willingness to participate at least once. This list could be used to further build on, and expand the amount and variety of offers that members could enjoy.

2. Career

Our second focus point of our policy plan was career. We judged that it is a very important task of a study association to offer members more ways to improve their preparation for their careers. Especially for psychology students, who do not have the guarantee to get a job, we found this very important. Our general conclusion is that we still think that the VSPA should focus on the professional future of its members. We think that it a good idea if future boards try to come up with new ideas to ameliorate this cause in the years to come. Although finding interesting and relevant side jobs for psychology students and setting up a new committee are both very difficult, we think we did quite good in the start of a new view on the study association as being more focused on career. Below you can read more about the details of our focusing point ‘career’.

Firstly, we talk about our new committee, the Workshop Committee. Secondly, we talk about expanding the vacancies on our website. Thirdly, we discuss the subject of study rooms.

2.1. Workshop Committee In the policy plan we wrote about our ambition to organize four workshops in order to help our members to develop skills and knowledge. Unfortunately, only three out of four workshops took place this year, because one of them - the theatre workshop - only had one registration. The attendance at the workshops was always fairly low; around fifteen. The costs of the workshops were very high; excluding participant fees, about €250,- per workshop. The people who attended the workshop found the workshops fun and instructive. Because of the 'low' attendance, the speaker was able to interact more with the audience, this was very contributory to the quality. The reason for the fairly low attendances is not very clear.. This can be due to the promotion, which often started quite late. It can also be due to the dates, the workshops were often planned just before busy weeks for the students. It also might be due to the subjects. The workshops are special because they are for small amounts of groups.

Focusing on very small groups is a fun thing of this committee but when you estimation, it can be dessastreus. Our whorkshop about ‘Theater’ whent wrong we had almost no registrations. But ‘Human profiling’, ‘Children’ and ‘Motivation’ had enouhg registrations. The costs are high while the benefits are relatively low because not many people show up. The people who did come found it very nice, so this indicates that the benefits are certainly present. In addition, we are a study association, so we can invest quite a bit of money in the knowledge and skills of the members. The conclusion is that it is a difficult cost-benefit analysis.

2.2. Expansion Vacancies During the first semester we realised we had contradicted ourselves in a way in our policy plan by saying on the one hand that we wanted to expand our vacancies to support members in building on their career by helping them finding jobs, and on the other hand mentioning that it could be a great way to make some money on the side for the VSPA - companies would pay per employee we referred to them. Because this approach meant that we would deny some companies that were not able or did not want to pay for that, which meant that we might have withheld our members some interesting job opportunities.

This year we had many companies approach us to promote a certain vacancy. These requests were all forwarded to Raz who, in the first few months, usually replied with a list of the promotion options and the corresponding prices. Although this approach did help earn some of the Acquisition money (for more information, see F. 4.6.2 Acquisition revenue), Raz saw that most companies kindly declined the offer because they had no budget or did not want to pay for a service like that.

At our HYR, with the help of our advisory bodies we realised that with this approach we were denying our members some vacancies that they might actually be interested in. Because of this, we changed our approach for the second semester in two ways: - Upon receiving a request to share a vacancy, Raz would look into the company and the vacancy and consider to share it for free, based on certain factors like how interesting the vacancy would be for psychology students and whether the company was big/well-known enough to probably be able to pay for the service. - We also started looking for voluntary work vacancies that would be interesting for psychology student. Raz got in touch with a few companies that offer volunteer jobs to ask them whether they had some vacancies relevant for psychology students.

This approach had a great result on our job bank: although we did not make as much money with promoting the vacancies as we did in the first semester, the amount of vacancies on our website tripled in size! In the first semester 7 vacancies were on the job bank, at the time of writing this, you can find 21 vacancies on our website.

We have promoted the job bank with posts on our Facebook-page and with a banner on the narrowcasting screens throughout building G. Because it is private information, we do not really know how many students actually applied to the vacancies we shared. But due to some

private conversations and the amount of people some vacancy-Facebook-posts reached and the response to these posts, we are fairly positive that it has helped some of our members find a place to work, volunteer and/or learn. We hope this approach will be continued in the years to come, so that the VSPA can become more than an association that helps her members enjoy their years as a student, by playing a role in preparing students for the workfield.

2.3. Study Rooms We started the concept of the study rooms this year to offer VSPA members a quiet place to study during exam periods, when the campus library is known to be very crowded. As mentioned in our HYR, we were careful with promotion at first because we had not gotten official permission from psychology’s GS. However, the GS was enthusiastic about our idea and this encouraged us to design posters for the study rooms and to create a Facebook group for students in which we could keep them updated on the latest study rooms. This has proven to be very effective: members became acquainted with the study rooms quickly and were eager to visit them. Lately, our study rooms have been filled to the nook!

In our policy plan we planned on maybe booking up to three study rooms at a time. During his year, this was never really necessary: filling two study rooms would be too ambitious. However, this option could be explored in the future if study rooms gain popularity. What we did notice is that there is a need for study rooms during the entire exam period, even the week before. Therefore, it is recommended to book study rooms every day during and right before exam periods.

Practically, it turned out easiest to book the study rooms in the G building, as they are close to the VSPA room. This way, the board member that is on room duty could easily walk back and forth between the VSPA room and the study room to check if everyone is doing okay and if everything is nice and quiet. At the beginning of the year, when we would book rooms in other buildings on campus, there would always have to be a board member present, and this was not very practical. The only problem about booking rooms in the G building is that there is no service desk in the building. To open the booked room, we would have to ask someone at the Student Desk to borrow their pass. They were not always too happy about this, as opening rooms is not really part of their job. This small inconvenience might be avoided by obtaining a pass to open all rooms in the G building. If study rooms are continued in the future, we recommend striking up a conversation with the UvA and discussing possibilities to improve our access to rooms in the G building.

In our policy plan we described how we had already decided the system of signing up for study rooms was not ideal. In hindsight, we are still happy with this decision, as this allowed flexibility for people visiting the study rooms. The concept kind of runs itself, and doesn’t need much guidance. The same goes for our idea of schedules to administer how long members would stay in the study room: it just wasn’t really necessary.

In regards to promotion, we think the Facebook group has been a very effective move. After establishment, all board members added their VSPA Facebook friends. Besides, the group

was open for anyone who wanted to join. This way, the group quickly expanded in size. This helped us reach a large amount of students, and moreover, students who were actually interested. At some times, we were a little late in announcing newly booked study rooms, but thanks to the Facebook group, this was not really a problem. Actually, students quickly started asking questions about study rooms themselves, making the group quite lively. At the time of writing, the Facebook group consists of 398 members. Next to the Facebook group, we also regularly posted on our general VSPA page, promoting both the study rooms and the Facebook group, hoping to get all members acquainted with the study rooms, and with the group to keep them up-to-date.

All in all, we think we can say that the study rooms are a success. We are happy to facilitate effective studying for our members by offering them a quiet place to work. We think the study rooms have been a nice addition to our focus point, career.

B. Committee Policy

1. Focus Points for all Committees

The committees exist for members who want to be more involved with the VSPA and her activities. The committees contribute to the interaction between the VSPA and its members by organizing both study related and social activities. Members can extend life next to studying by participating and / or organizing them by going to a committee. This year, we managed the committees by two focus points: accessibility and transparency. The way we tried to hold on to these focus point is described below.

1.1. Accessibility Concerning accessibility, we think we did a pretty good job. Every member of the VSPA could apply for a committee and we promoted a lot. We did use a maximum of seven committee members to make sure the committee would not get too many members. We think this has had a positive effect on efficiency and productivity; the tasks that had to be done were well distributed everybody, had about the same workload. Everybody sent in a motivation letter and nearly everybody got in the committee they wanted to be part of in the first place. Some committees had too many applications causing a selection of the motivation letters. Only a few members didn’t join the committee they wanted to join, but we successfully convinced them into another committee. The Simmer Committee and the Friday Afternoon Borrel Committee (FAB Committee) consisted of more than seven members, because for these committees ‘the more helping hands, the better’ rule applies.

Some of the study related committees did not get filled up with seven committee members immediately. At the beginning of the year we really went after this and we tried to find enthusiastic members by promoting on social media, by talking to as many members as possible, by promoting during lectures and by promoting during FYW. When the organising of events by the committees started, we started to pay less attention to this because the existing committee members had our full attention. Through the year we did promote for some committees on Facebook or the website but this did not always result in the full committees we wanted. It is quite a step for people to join an existing committee in the middle of the year, whereas starting from the beginning seems very easy and fun. We recommend to make the existing committee members enthusiastic for convincing friends/others to join the committee.

We did make sure that it was easy for every member to join a committee by promotion on the website and Facebook, by talking with members in the introduction week, in the first month of school and during the FYW. We did a little presentation in a first and second year lecture as well. Besides these promotion ways, first year students had the possibility to indicate whether they were interested in joining a committee or not when they bought a membership on the website. We sent the interested members an email about the committees. Unfortunately, we didn’t switch off this possibility when some committees were full. This

resulted in some disappointments for people who were interested in an already full committee.

1.1.1. Accessibility Senior Students Unfortunately, the co-operation with the fractions went less smoothly than expected. It appeared to be hard to really get attention from the fractions and on our part there has not been that much enthusiasm either. There has been little communication between us and them. The fractions did regularly share our events on their Facebook pages; we think, however, that this did not really help to get senior students enthusiastic, which was our goal in the first place. It simply appears to be very hard to make senior students more involved in the VSPA and through the year, we considered the involvement of the first an second year students as more important. We think senior students aren’t that interested in VSPA anymore because they found their own ways, interests and friends; they don’t need the VSPA anymore to help them with that.

1.1.2. Accessibility Policy Issues Through the year we have had well attended GMAs, expect for one, where we had to call people to come to the GMA so that we would have enough attendees. Amongst them were several first-year students. During the first committee meeting, Egbert and Nina explained what a GMA is and what the role of a member can be during a GMA. Furthermore, they have emphasized that it is important to visit the GMAs. During the first meeting they gave examples of how a regular member can have influence on the policy of the VSPA and that made some committee members very enthusiastic. Through the year, the committee affairs officers (CAOs) have announced the GMAs when one was planned. However, they did not promote every GMA in every committee, especially not for the last few GMAs. Fortunately, the GMAs yet had a sufficient amount of visitors.

We have the idea that the GMAs were accessible for all members and that there was a reasonable amount of input coming from different angles. At the beginning of the year, Merlijn discussed with Flora about how to make the GMAs as accessible as possible. According to us, we did succeed in making agenda items manageable but we did not always explain what they contained of. This would have been neat but we often lacked time during GMAs so we let that go after a while.

1.2. Transparency In order to increase transparency within the committees, we have devised several points in our policy plan. First of all, we set up a very clear, informative first meeting for every committee separately. In addition, we wanted to use Google as the primary communication channel. Finally, we wanted a fixed meeting moment in each committee every week. We think the first point was a success. The first meeting was instructive, for the new committee members it created a lot of clarification about the VSPA and its structure and its position at the UvA. For the senior students it was nice as well, because they got to know the 'new' things such as the new board. The result of this was that every committee member, whether they were experienced or not, started as an equal committee member.

Google is also very well evaluated upon as a communication channel. The minutes and meeting agendas were easy to find, everyone was able to look closely at the finances and the mails could easily be read or answered by each committee member. At last the fixed meeting hour in a week was a big success. The attendance of committee members was high and it saved us a lot of time planning meetings. The committees with fixed meeting moments were much more stable.

In conclusion, we think we have succeeded reasonably well this year concerning our committee focus point transparency.

2. Start-up and General

2.1. Start-up of the committees With the exception of six committees, we wanted to start the committees in the week after FYW. In addition, taking into account the committee focus points, we wanted to be clear about the functions that could be distributed in the committees. We did this by sending an explanatory email prior to the first meeting.

The start-up has succeeded with most committees. The Excursion Committee and the Parent Day Committee did not have enough registrations in the beginning, so they started later. The mail that explained the functions that was sent in advance was successful. Everyone in the meeting was informed about the functions and the less experienced VSPA members were often enthusiastic about a function. We explained the VSPA and her structure using a PowerPoint and we got very positive feedback on that from the committee members.

The start-up was very nice. Our advice is to start as soon as possible. Especially for the Study Trip Committee we advise to start earlier so there is less stress about the Amsterdam University Fund (AUF) grant application. In addition, it is useful to start as soon as possible with committees with few members. We have noticed that once there are two people in it they can convince friends to join the committee.

2.2. Functions within the Committees We generally had four functions within each committee. The chair, the treasurer, the acquisi- G and the promoprince(ss). The chairman had to lead the committee and try to keep the overview in cooperation with the CAO. The treasurer had the task to keep an eye on the finances of the committee. Robin helped committee treasurers by giving a brief treasuring tutorial. The acquisi-G would ensure the search for sponsorship for the committee. He/she was responsible for things like the content of goodie bags. Lastly the promoprince(ss), the head of the event promotion. This meant that he/she was responsible for the promotion of an event. He/she made a promotion planning with the CAO and made sure every committee member was involved in the promotion.

We are very positive about this function distribution. Because there were 'many' functions, each member could offer something special to the committee.

2.3. Development within the committees In the policy plan we wrote that we highly value the personal development of the committee members, we think we succeeded in this. We wanted this development by having a maximum of seven committee members and by planning evaluating meetings once in a while. Maintaining the maximum of seven people in a committee has succeeded well and we really liked it. The committee members all had something to do but it was not too heavy. The interim evaluation has unfortunately been less successful. The ones that took place were quite useful but not every committee had one. This happened, because they were not always announced well and scheduled at the start of the year.

The evaluation reviews that did take place were very successful. It may work better if they are scheduled at the beginning of the year. We really advise to do as many evaluations as possible.

2.4. Closing and transmission We wanted to make it clear to the committees that the ending evaluation of the year and writing of the transmission document are important. This is important both for themselves and for the next year; both they and the successive committee can learn a lot from a good evaluation.

We have evaluated with all committees. The transmission documents of committees have been completely rewritten by Nina and Egbert. We have structured each committee transmission document in three parts: general part for every committee (functions within a committee, making annual planning, budget, promotion schedule, etc.), a social / study related specific part and then a small part for the specific committee. As a result, a committee member who is in several committees does not have to read the same things over and over,and only one document needs to be adjusted when there is an improvement. Because Nina and Egbert had the best overview we let them write them.

3. Role of the Board

This year, we think we succeeded in close contact between the board and our members. While writing our policy plan, we underestimated the extent to which board members are in contact with committee members. This was just very positive; we had figured out how every board member would be involved a bit in committees, but in fact it soon became clear that as a board you are involved as a whole with active members through activities or in the VSPA room. We all enjoyed bonding with our members very much; this has enabled us to keep in touch with them in a low-threshold manner. During the first committee meetings, Egbert and Nina used a PowerPoint presentation to introduce each board member individually, so that active member knew who we were and what we could do for them.

Unlike planned in the policy plan, Egbert and Nina took care of the committee chairs instead of Merlijn. After the first committee meeting where the chair is chosen, Egbert and Nina met

up with each chair for an hour to discuss and go through the tasks that belong to a committee chair. This seemed to be more useful than with Merlijn because of the close contact the CAOs have with committee chairs. Egbert and Nina were available throughout the year for any question from the chairs and together with them they made schedules for the activities.

Robin has organized a few pennymasterclasses for the treasurers of all committees. In these classes, she first explained their tasks on the basis of an example of a budget and then she gave the treasurers an exercise so they could make their own budget. The CAOs both visited this class as well and this was a very nice idea. It was important for them to know what Robin taught their committee treasurers and it showed interest and involvement of the CAOs.

Raz has taken care of the Acquisi-G’s. Every Acquisi-G could set up a meeting with him to discuss his/her role in the concerning committee. They discussed options voor acquisition and Raz helped him/her set up a standard mail to send to companies the committee wants to approach. These meetings were not attended by the CAOs. The Acquisi-G’s were enthusiastic after these meetings and they knew what they had to do.

Initially, the promoprinces and princesses were accompanied by a promo head from the Promotion Committee to make a promotion schedule, but this soon turned out not to be the best way for managing the promotion. The CAOs took over this task from the Promotion Committee so that they would have a better overview of promotion in committees. Beside this, just like the reason for the CAOs taking care of the chairs, the close contact between a CAO and a promoprince/-princes appeared to be a huge advantage.

In our policy plan we wrote that we strive to always have a board member at a committee meeting, preferably a CAO of course. It happened a few times that the CAO couldn’t make it and didn’t manage to find another board member to join a meeting. It really depends on the type and importance of the meeting whether this is harmful or not. It doesn’t necessarily add value to let another board member join the meeting; we recommend to let the committee chair report the content of the meeting to the CAO.

4. Specific Committee Policy: Social Committees

4.1. Activities Committee This year, the Activities Committee consisted of seven enthusiastic committee members with a nice balance of first year students and senior students. The committee has organised four activities where known and sometimes unknown members came together. Early in December, the Activities Committee started with a pub quiz in Cafe de Havelaar. It was a fun event to organise for the committee and nearly sixty members showed up. The second activity was a cozy movie night at Kapitein Zeppos. This activity attracted a little less people (35). This seemed to be due to the timing (Valentine’s Day) and due the fact that we missed some members who did not want to watch the specifically chosen movie (Forrest Gump). The next activity was laser gaming in the wild; this was a fun, original activity at which forty participants were divided in teams and played different games with and against each other in

the Sarphatipark. The last activity was a boat trip with silent disco through the canals. This was a popular event as well and it worked out very well. It was a great year with the Activities Committee in which a very sociable committee has organised successful events. We think an amount of four activities is the exact right amount per year: there’s enough space for creative ideas and it gives the committee enough time to make them happen. Besides the fact that a lot of participants of the activities were known in the VSPA, the pubquiz and the silent disco boat party attracted some unknown names, which made us pleasantly surprised.

4.2. Borrel Committee The Borrel Committee started off this year with seven committee members and it ended with six. There has been a total of sixteen borrels in the Heeren van Aemstel this year, of which three were organized by the board: Intreeborrel, ‘Eerste Echte Borrel’ (“First Real Borrel”) and the Youtopia borrel. De committee did not exist yet or only just one week when these borrels took place. In our policy plan, we wrote a plan to play a different kind of music each borrel to make every music lover happy, but this didn’t really happen. It’s quite hard to please the whole crowd with another type of music every time. Some theme borrels actually were linked to a type of music and in that case the Borrel Committee made sure that kind of music was in the playlist (for example Mexicoborrel, Amsterdam borrel). The Borrel Committee had a meeting every week and in the beginning of the year, the committee linked festive themes to every borrel. The attendance of members (and friends) was pretty high through the year; we had two borrels to which considerably fewer people showed up, but overall the committee was pretty satisfied with that. During the year, the Borrel Committee used a tight promotion schedule/plan that made sure that the borrel events were online on Facebook very quickly so that there was enough time to promote. It was a very convivial, sometimes chaotic year with the Borrel Committee in which the committee always had fun with each other before and during the borrels.

4.3. Party Committee This year, the Party Committee consisted of seven first year UvA students. In the first instance we had put four parties in the year planning, but this soon turned out to be very tight in time; after the first party the board and committee found out there was too little time between the first and the second party. The committee found this a big bummer and decided to do a collaboration with the Borrel Committee. The parties were as follows. The first one, the Pim Pam Party found place in the Chicago Social Club early in November. It was a big success with a high attendance level whereat a big buffer of money was left for the next party/parties. The second event of the Party Committee was a collaboration with the Borrel Committee: Winter Wonderland. Unlike previous years, this borrel took place in the familiar Heeren van Aemstel. Other christmas borrels/parties were often organized in another place to make it more special but we actually only saw the advantage of the good collaboration with Heeren van Aemstel. And we weren’t wrong: the place was fully packed and it seemed everyone had a great party. This was kind of a Borrel Deluxe which took place right before the Christmas break. The second big party was Cirque Du SoLit and took place in Club Panama. For this party we had not properly taken into account the fact that the second party is always less well attended than the first one. A lot fewer people showed up than expected and

this caused a considerable loss of money on the second party. However, we made up for this with the last party, the USA Houseparty in Club Up, a very cozy and festive houseparty as a closing of the year. The Party Committee was a very good functioning committee with an organized chair and very enthusiastic members who got along really well and had knowledge of their responsibilities.

4.4. Gala Committee This committee was new this year; before '17/'18, the gala was organised by the board. The Gala Committee consisted of seven committee members and the gala took place in February. In the policy plan we wrote that the CAO of the Gala Committee would write a committee plan to make clear what this new committee would look like, but this didn’t happen. During the first meetings, the committee and the CAO just brainstormed together and this worked out fine. The location was the Badhuistheater. It was a very cozy, intimate location that seemed very suitable for this occasion. It really was suitable, but the disadvantage was that the owner did not have any experience with this kind of event. We found difficulty in the communication; the owner was very enthusiast but we just were not on the same page with each other. He often did not know what we wanted and what was necessary for organizing this event. The catering was not as good as we expected; the staff seemed in a hurry and the dinner was over pretty soon. The promotion of the gala went very well: the event was sold out and there was a promo movie and a contest for winning tickets. All in all, it was a successful event with a performance of the Starfield band (consists of VSPA members) and several DJ’s. Due to the flexibility of the owner of the Badhuistheater, the committee could make a lot of ideas happen and the atmosphere was really good and cozy. The committee had put a lot of thought in the ambiance and decoration and this worked out really well.

4.5. Hitchhiking Committee The Hitchhiking Committee counted seven committee members and organized the hitchhiking competition in the weekend of 8 June. This year, we booked a bus for the way back for the first time. We would really recommend doing this every year. Before this year, participants went back to Amsterdam hitchhiking or they booked a bus/train themselves. In the first place we would return by bus on Sunday night, but the committee argued for Monday night and this worked out really well. It was a very nice weekend in Leipzig with optional activities to participate everyday, organized by the committee. The Hitchhiking Committee had a long run to the weekend, but the time they had was well spend. This resulted in a very nice weekend with a filled goodie bag and fun activities. A black edge at the weekend was the fact that one hitchhike couple did not make it to Leipzig because the couple was too far from the route and the two were too far behind at one point. Some couples arrived in Leipzig really late and the pick up car has been driving until deep into the night. The committee members were aware of their responsibilities and through the year they were very motivated to make the hitchhike weekend a memorable one.

4.6. Music Committee The Music Committee has a composition of members that stays the same each year and at the start of the year the committee consisted of nine members. This amount dropped to seven

members after we found out that two of them were not members of the VSPA. There’s been organized a total of eight Live Music Nights in the Maloe Melo. They each had a different theme, and once we found out that people get excited about karaoke, we added that to the promotion for every music night. The first few live music nights were well attended but after these the amount of members decreased. We think this was due to chaos within the committee, the timing of the live music nights (Tuesdays, and often in the same week as a borrel) and insufficient promotion. From time to time, the music nights were planned on the same evening as a GMA and this worked really well: we could take the GMA attendees to Maloe Melo to drink a borrel. Chaos within the committee was a result of the long term composition of the same committee members. We have agreed that the members of the Music Committee quits so that the new board can make a new composition of members. Obviously, the old members can apply for this committee.

4.7. Skiing Committee The Skiing Committee started off in May 2017 with four committee members and Nena Luttik of the board of 2016/2017 as CAO. Nina already joined those meetings at that time. In September, the committee was filled up by three other members. One of the members who started in May quitted the committee, so eventually we were with six committee members and one CAO. The ski trip had Valmeinier as destination and took place between the 12th and the 21th of January 2018. A total of 49 members joined the trip. The committee had organized some fun activities such as a walk-in-dinner, a ski race and a game night. The rooms in the accommodation were small, but the hotel was located directly at the piste and was equipped with all necessities. We worked with travel organization Husk, just like almost every year. This time, we had two important things that went wrong: when we arrived at the hotel after the bus ride, it appeared that only two rooms were booked and the day we left, the bus appeared to leave two hours later than expected. Both things were fixed but did cause some inconvenience. Beside this, it was a very successful week with a big, fun group of VSPA members.

4.8. Sports Committee This year, the Sports Committee consisted of seven committee members who were all very motivated to organize three great events. Due to the tightness of the year planning, all three activities were eventually planned in the second semester. This distribution was not ideal for the committee but they made the best out of it and organized three successful events. In February, the first event took place in USC Science park: ‘Apenkooien’. It is a Dutch game that most students played in elementary/high school. The attendance was lower than we had hoped but we still had a lot of fun. We did a lot of promotion, we think that the activity was just too expensive voor VSPA standards and for this specific activity (7,-). The second event took place in May and was a big success. We played padel, a racquet sport. It was very accessible for every participant and we had some hot dogs and beers afterwards. The third activity took place in the beginning of June: Fun Forest. This activity involved climbing in trees and ziplining from one to another in the Amsterdamse Bos. The Sports Committee was a very fun, enthusiastic committee with a lot of creative ideas.

4.9. Trip Committee The Trip Committee consisted of seven committee members this year and organized the trip to Lille. They started in May 2017 with Nena Luttik (of the board of 2016/2017) as CAO; Nina also attended the meetings of that time. We left with fifty students to Lille on November 10. The committee had organized fun activities and it was a very nice city for this trip. The committee and the board had to deal with a huge setback when we arrived on location: the hostel appeared to be booked for 2018, a year later. We immediately took action and managed to book sleeping places for everyone and the participants ultimately had hardly any problems with it. Below is more information about this incident. It was also a very nice weekend with a nice, large group where a number of first-year students had a good acquaintance with the VSPA. The Trip Committee of 2018/2019 also started in May 2018 with the organization of the trip and Pauline Claes, CAO of 2018/2019 attended the meetings.

4.9.1. Wrong hostel booking As mentioned above, when we arrived at the hostel in Lille it appeared that the booking was placed for exactly one year later: 2018 instead of 2017. Of course we were very shocked, but we quickly booked rooms in two other hotels so that after one hour waiting everyone had shelter, spread over three places. For the second night we made sure everyone was sleeping in the same hotel. Fortunately, the participants did not suffer much because the problem could be solved quickly. It did cost us a lot of money to book hotel rooms. After the weekend was over and we had evaluated with the committee, we started the project to cancel the 2018 reservation and get back the money of the reservation in 2018 we paid for. At first it was up to the committee to do, but after a while Nina picked it up. The contact with the hostel was difficult and slowly, but finally we came to an agreement. We could cancel the reservation but we could not get the money back. The hostel promised us a credit with them of the exact amount of the 2018 reservation (€2.234,54). We don’t have a contract with the hostel but we do have an email from the manager of Gastama, concerning a confirmation of the agreement. We can spend this amount at any time. Once it became clear that we couldn’t get the money back, we had to come up with other solutions. As described in HYR, we suggested four options. - finding another study association that would like to go to Lille; - offer the credit on a holiday auction website; - organise the ski trip to another branch of the Gastama Hostel in Les Deux Alpes; - organise the trip of ‘19/’20 to Lille.

The first two options appeared to be impossible since the hostel told us we could not resell the credit to third parties. To organise the ski trip to the other branch of the Gastama would be a big hassle because they had just opened this branch and the hostel in the Alpes wasn’t linked to a travel organization like Husk; that is how the VSPA usually organizes ski trips and it is the cheapest way. A good option would therefore be to organize the 2019 or 2020 trip to Lille. This is explained clearly in the transfer document of the Trip Committee and will be added to the transfer committee of the CAO of the Trip Committee. Looking back on this long journey of email and phone call echanges, we would rather have finished the process earlier. It took very long to get and keep in touch with the hostel, and we noticed it wasn’t

always our priority either. For more information about the agreement with the hostel, the initial booking contract and the refund process, see the server under '17/'18 board member Nina Somer.

5. Specific Committee Policy: Study Related Committees

5.1. Altruism Committee This year, we wanted to let the VSPA members get in contact with volunteering as much as possible with this committee. The main goal was the volunteer organisation ‘de Regenboog groep’. But the ambition was to also find a lot of other volunteering work. In addition, the committee wanted to organize a benefit event. The year started well with the Regenboog groep, but as soon as this went well enough the committee no longer really knew what they wanted or had to do. Egbert thought that he would help the committee by giving them freedom, so they could give content to the committee themselves. However, this did not turn out to be a good approach. The committee continued to struggle throughout the rest of the year, because they did not know what they had to do. Some volunteers were found for activities, but the big successes stayed out. For example, they did not manage to organize a benefit event.

The idea of the committee is very nice, but being the intermediate between volunteers and volunteering organisations does not really feel like an active role. After a while it was no longer motivating. Yet, the committee can also take care of this if the CAO better prepares the committee members for what they can expect. We advise to better prepare the committee for their task or let the board do it.

5.2. Career Committee This committee wanted to organize two activities. First the networking borrel and then the career day. For this career day, there would be cooperation with the Section of Psychology Students of the Dutch Institute of Psychologists (SPS-DIP) and the fractions. The networking borrel was canceled, because there was too little enthusiasm from the companies. In addition, organizing the career day was a difficult task. A lot of parties were involved in this organization: the committee, VSPA board, the SPS-DIP (UvA’s department), the national SPS-DIP, the fractions, the UvA (also having various sub parties), the six speakers, the ten companies, the caterer and the location management. Because of this big amount of parties, we often had difficulties. This difficulty was mainly in communication. This was largely overcome because we had discussed this in advance with the co-organizer, SPS-DIP. We liked to work with them. In the end, the quality of the day was pretty reasonable, but due to the moderate promotion there were not many attendants.The promotion was moderate because we started to late because we had not fixed everything on time, so we had to wait with the promotion.

Organizing a networking borrel is strongly discouraged. This has been tried for two years now, but has never succeeded. In addition, the career day is a great event, but this may need more attention from the board than it has had in our year.

5.3. Conference Committee The main goal of the conference was to teach VSPA members something about a certain psychological subject. For this we wanted a topical issue that both national and international speakers came to speak about. We also wanted to try to create a conference that was as interactive as possible so that the conference would not feel too long. The conference was in Studio/K and the subject was loneliness. The location was very nice, we had a successful day. The subject was very current, but perhaps not very exciting, and as a result it did not immediately attract many students. Finding an international speaker turned out to be too ambitious and certainly not necessary. Despite this, we had very good speakers, such as Ivan Wolffers, Gerine Lodder, Jos van Velzen and Ellis van der Meulen. We also had a nice presentation by No Isolation about a robot aiding in fighting loneliness. There was also a painting workshop given by Peik Suyling that was very interesting.

The goal to create a lot of interaction has come true. Most speakers tried to do something with this, which made it feel less long. Making the conference bigger has, eventually, succeeded reasonably well. It is a long-term plan and this year is a step in the right direction. The subject is really important for the promotion, the coming years have to take this into account.

5.4. Excursion Committee The goal was to organize four excursions and to teach the members something about psychology in a fun way. Unfortunately, we did not manage to organize all four excursions. In the beginning it was difficult to recruit enough committee members, so the committee started off later. As a result, the first excursion did not take place, because it was scheduled too early. In addition, the excursion to Dolhuys (the Museum of the Mind) did not take place because there were too few registrations. Two days before the event we had only two registrations.

We did go to the Scientology church. Prior to the visit to this church we had a lecture about sects. VSPArtis was the second excursion, we had a lecture about animal cognition and then we walked through Artis, Amsterdam’s zoo. These too excursions were very popular. This year, it was pretty difficult to come up with nice, affordable excursions.

5.5. Lecture Committee We wanted to organize four lectures and get a high quality on these lectures. To improve this quality, we put extra money into this committee. Unfortunately we have not succeeded in improving quality, it has been very difficult to actually find speakers who give good lectures. There are also many speakers who wanted to speak for free. These speakers were sometimes people who just wanted to come and talk about the topic and sometimes speakers who wanted to promote for their own company. We did manage to organize five lectures, one more than originally planned. And the attendance was always between 35 and 85 attendees, so we are satisfied with that.

The good free speakers were found through the UvA. For next year this is a good advice to use. In addition, it is advisory to let the students pay for a lecture. Our busiest lecture was a lecture with an entrance fee. Because of this, there can be a paid and hopefully better speaker, and we think that the students will cancel less quickly because they have already paid for it.

5.6. Parent Day Committee The aim was to give the members's families more insight into the study of psychology and the life of the students. We wanted to do this by means of a lecture and a guided tour on the campus.

The parent day was fun but unfortunately there were less people than budgeted for; 60 instead of 100. In terms of content it was a nice day. The lecture was arranged with help of Peter Starreveld. Peter and Annemie Ploeger were the speakers. They both gave a lecture of one hour about animal cognition.

In addition, there was a guided tour on the campus but many buildings were closed during the tour, which was a shame. In addition to these activities, the committee had organized a dinner and a borrel with a pub quiz. The dinner by caterer Cormet was, as in previous years, difficult to arrange, because Cormet is not very good at communicating. The borrel was in CREA and was very nice.

The lower turnout than hoped was a shame. Also, the food made by Cormet was not great. We have to look at this carefully in following years. Maybe another name could help, to attract more than only the parents.

5.7. Study Trip Committee The purpose of this committee was to organize a fun, interesting, pleasant, educational journey. This was aimed to be achieved with a visit to the university, other study related activities, cultural activities and social activities.

It was a beautiful, well organized trip. The trip went to Tel Aviv, with additional day trips to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and Akko. The university of Tel Aviv was also visited. And we had guided tours with psychological information. It was also a very gezellig and pleasant week. Looking back on the trip, two things were very important and - we think - decisive for a good study trip.

First that the weather was good; this creates a good vibe, so it is recommended to take this into account when choosing a location. In addition, the hostel was also very nice, because of a large common space inside but also outside on the roof. The group could be together rather than be divided among different rooms.

5.8. Workshop Committee This year we revived the Workshop Committee as a part of our focus point of accessibility.

That is why we have already evaluated this in the above at A.2.1. Workshop Committee, look here for the evaluation of this committee.

6. Administrative Bodies

The association has a couple of administrative bodies which care for the existence of the association in cooperation with the board. Although this section is part of the committee policy, the administrative bodies are officially not committees. There are different rules for these bodies in comparison to the rules for the committees. Thes administrative bodies are the Supervisory Board (SB), the Cash Audit Committee (CAC), the General Members Assembly Committee (GMA Committee), the Application Guidance Committee (AGC), the Application Committee (AC) and the First-year Coordination Committee (FCC). Below we will write about what these bodies did during this academic year and how they cooperated with the board.

6.1. Supervisory Board This year, the SB consisted of Nella Schrijver (chair), Hannah van der Laan (secretary), Richtsje Kurpershoek, and Jeffrey Nengerman. Hannah and Richtsje were members of the board of 2016/2017, whereas Nella and Jeffrey had participated in many committees, during and prior to this year. Together they possessed a nice mix of knowledge, experience and vision regarding the VSPA.

This year, the SB took on a monitoring role in making sure the board acted in accordance with the Charter, the SR and active policy of the VSPA. We feel that the SB found a nice balance between advising us, the board, and letting us be free to make our own decisions and even, our own mistakes. At the start of the year, the Board and the SB sat together in a meeting to discuss mutual expectations. During this meeting we talked about ways to make the work of an SB member less extensive. Subsequently, the SB tried to focus less on financial points and more on the bigger picture: whether we acted accordingly to our policy. We think this did indeed help to lighten the workload of the SB. We also thought of ways to be most effective in board meetings. We tried to achieve this by following the ‘BOB’ cycle, a model for decision forming in which you first discuss things in regards to imaging the situation, secondly things regarding judgment, and thirdly make the decision. This allowed us to have more structural meetings and made it easier not to forget any opinions or aspects of the discussion.

Halfway through the year, we had another meeting to evaluate the role of the SB and the effectiveness of board meetings. This is highly recommendable as we feel evaluating helped a lot.

Next to their monitoring role, the members of the SB also took on a counseling role. Each member of the SB functioned as a counselor for one or two board members. Each board member has had at least two conversations with their SB-confidant. In these conversations,

we would discuss our goals, areas of development and difficulties throughout the year. We all experienced this as pleasant and motivating.

At the beginning of May, Jeffrey left to go on a journey through South America. Nella, Richtsje and Hannah then continued with the three of them, and this worked out fine.

All in all, the SB has supported us a lot throughout the year and provided us with lots of relevant feedback without forcing their opinions. They helped us to develop ourselves and to create the best regulatory pieces that we could. For this, we are thankful!

6.2. Cash Audit Committee This year, the CAC consisted of Anne Chatrou (chair),Vincent Schreuder, Stijn Fischer and Shy-Ann Moehamatdjalil. Anne, Vincent and Stijn were members of the board of 2016/2017, in which Anne was the treasurer. Formerly, the CAC checked the accounting system twice a year. This was only for the HYR and the annual result. This caused a lot of stress to the treasurer at both times. So to reduce this, the CAC proposed to check four times through the year. This idea worked really well for Robin and also for the CAC itself. The communication was also very good this year and the CAC was always ready to help when the treasurer had a question. In addition to checking the accounting system, the CAC also checked the budgets and results of the committees, they were presented at the board meetings and gave advice over the HYR, Policy Plan and the Annual Report.

In June, Stijn, just as Jeffrey, left to go on a trip through South America and the other three CAC members took on a little more work.

In conclusion, we are also very thankful for our CAC and all of their good, sometimes tough but always fair, feedback, especially in this year which was not the easiest one financially.

6.3. General Members Assembly Committee This year, the GMA Committee consisted of Flora Huberts (chair) and Iris Wierdsma (secretary). For some GMAs one of the two members of the committee were absent. Due to this we had to look for temporary replacers, whom we were able to find at all occasions. Apart from chairing and minuting the GMA, the committee - in cooperation with the board - also took care of the promotion of the event, through email and Facebook. They also bought snacks and drinks for during the meetings. In general, we were content about the cooperation with this committee.

After the GMA of the 22nd of May, Flora quitted as the chair and Iris took her position. Iris’s position was taken over by Loïs Riemens.

6.4. Application Guidance Committee This year, the AGC consisted of four members: Nina Somer (chair), Richtsje Kurpershoek (treasurer), Egbert Peppelman (general member) and Nena Luttik (general member). The goal of this committee was to find new candidates for the board of year ’18/’19. The AGC made a

list of a large amount of active members (committee members) and other members, who were not in a committee but who were possibly interested in a role in het board. We called all of them and asked whether they were interested. There have been several Facebook posts as well that included a Google Forms members could fill in to show that they’re interested. We organized a panel discussion for the interested members and this worked out really well. Former board members came to tell about their experiences and the interested members could ask all of their questions about a board year. Everyone who was interested made an appointment with a AGC member and got an info booklet as well. The people who actually applied were guided through the application procedure by the AGC.

6.5. Application Committee This year’s AC consisted of the following five members: Nella Schrijver (chair), Merlijn van Montfoort (vice chair), Ivar van Assen (treasurer), Demi van der Helm (general member) and Lena van den Nieuwenhof (general member). There was no former board member in this committee. This used to be one of the conditions for the composition of the AC, but this changed after the GMA of the 12th of December, in which an adaptation to the SR was accepted by the GMA. You can read more about this below ‘C.2. General Members Assemblies’.

The AC had the responsibility of constructing the board of the academic year of 2018/2019. They did this by first discussing the existing application procedure. There were quite some parts of this procedure that they found too extensive. The main goal of the adjustment phase was to simplify the procedure - for example by omitting questions - without taking away valuable questions or other parts of the procedure. After the evaluating the old procedure, the board was constructed through two interviewing rounds and an assessment day. The new board was proposed to and accepted by the GMA of the 1st of May.

6.6. First-year Coordination Committee The FCC of 2016/2017 consisted of five members: Lena van den Nieuwenhof (chair), Lorenzo Holt (treasurer), Sanne Pijpers (secretary), Raz van Houts (general member/games CAO), and Philip Habig (general member). This committee was responsible for organizing the FYW. 185 Students (135 students 50 crew members) traveled to de Hoof in Someren, where this weekend has taken place for decades.

During this weekend the first year students got to know one another while enjoying great food, cheap beers, two different themed parties, lots of rain and all kinds of games on both Friday and Saturday - the Sunday was used for cleaning.

Last year one of the most heard complaints was that the Friday night game took too long. The friday committee tried to fix this by changing the activity from a spooky treasure hunt through Someren, to three games on the actual compound. One of the three activities sadly had to be canceled due to the heavy rain that night, therefore the activities the first years participated in were an interactive quiz, a balloon popping game, and a break moment (this was meant to be the border patrol game). By keeping the activities located on the compound

and by keeping the amount of activities to a minimum, the friday night programme was done by 12 (the year before, some groups did not get back until 02:00). This meant that the first years had more than enough time to get dressed and enjoy the party.

Besides the terrible weather it was a great weekend and both the first years and the crewmembers really enjoyed themselves, which is reflected in the registrations for next years crewmembers: the fifty crew spots were filled in 16 minutes, with a waiting list of 26 people signing up later.

One major improvement for the organization of the weekend would be to buy some extra walkie-talkies. It was nearly impossible for the FCC to stay in touch with one another, even though this is really important. This advice has already been shared with the new FCC, who are already working really hard with organizing the next first years weekend, and are taking the tip into full consideration. The new FCC is currently under supervision of Raz, who (as you might remember) has been part of this committee a few months ago. He overlooks the organizational process as a link between the committee and the board, and uses his experience to help the committee whenever needed. Although the committee will probably be highly independent next year, it still is really important that the transmission between Raz and Daan (the next contact person from the board) is top notch, because this person will most likely not have the same experience in organizing a weekend the size of this one.

Of course, some small inconveniences and points of improvement showed up; like keeping the mentors motivated and trying to enjoy the weekend itself as a really busy FCC member. These problems have all been addressed in the FCC transmission document.

7. Facilitary Committees

Next to social committees, study related committees and administrative bodies, there is another category of committees. These are the facilitating committees, which each support the VSPA in their own way. These committees and their journey throughout the year are set forth below.

7.1. Promotion Committee The Promotion Committee came into life last study year (2016-2017), its main objective being the promotion of the association and its activities. In the past two years it has proven to be a quite complicated committee without a real identity. As adressed in the Annual Report of 2016-2017 the committee bit of more than they could chew. That’s why, this year, we tried reforming the committee, so that their task description was clearer and less time-intensive. The main tasks of the Promotion Committee this year were: - Helping the Promoprince(ss), the member of one of the other committees in charge of the promotion, create a promotion plan. - Helping committees creating posters/banners for their events, if needed. - Helping in the promotion of the VSPA sweater. - Creating a VSPA promotion item.

- Creating a merchandise item. - Promote the VSPA during the matching days and the VSPAcquaintance. - Promote the Weekend Getaway.

Although this may still sound like a lot, it really wasn’t. The fact that the Promotion Committee only helped a committee create a promotion plan, and then took their hands off it, saved a lot of time and work. This may sound like a good thing, but the committee often found themselves looking for things to do. Some members admitted feeling less and less motivated because the committee had no real finish line or clear goal. We will elucidate the ways in which the Promotion Committee was involved in the areas mentioned above, pointwise: - Every member of the Promotion Committee was linked to two or three Promoprinces(ses) from other committees. They helped them create a promotion plan and gave advice if needed. This may sound like a great way to help committees start from scratch. But most of the Promotion Committee members had little to no experience in creating a promotion plan themselves which meant most of them just kind of improvised. This resulted in many committees having promotion plannings that differed from one another in the kind of promotion and the intensity of it. In an evaluation with CAOs Egbert and Nina, they mentioned that it is probably better for the consistency and efficiency of promotion plans if the Promoprince(ss) sits down with their CAO to create it. Adding a third party only makes it harder for a CAO to keep an overview of their different committees and their promotion plans. - Although the Promotion Committee offered committees help in creating posters/banners if needed, almost none of them had real experience with using Photoshop. In our policy plan the board mentioned budgeting money for a photoshop course at the ASVA). The GSAA never replied, therefore the course never happened. This meant that most of the committees who were in the VSPA room editing their promotion material usually asked help from one of the board members who was experienced with Photoshop. Merlijn and Raz did create a written Photoshop-tutorial with practice material later on in the year, but by this time most of the committees were almost done with the organization of their last events, so this too was of no real use for the Promotion Committee. - The Promotion Committee did play a role in helping the board promote the VSPA hoodies/sweaters. They came up with the idea to promote the sweaters on the trip to Lille, which did help the sales: a total of 157 sweaters were sold in total (compared to 68 last year), which means almost 10% of the VSPA members now has a hoodie/sweater. - A promotion item was created by the Promotion Committee: a red cardholder for your phone with the VSPA logo on it. We ordered 500 of them, so there are still many left for the years to come. We have heard positive reactions from the people who have them, and although the logo fades over time, it still is a great promotion piece. - In the second semester the Promotion Committee released a limited edition VSPA Dopper. The amount of people interested in one was pretty disappointing, which would mean there would be losses made if we ordered that exact amount. Because of

this reason the board decided to order a few extra and sell them for a little more than purchasing value (€9,99 instead of €8,99) to cover some of it. The people who did order one were quite positive. And now that we have a few left to showcase in the room and on our webshop we have heard some people who are interested. This way of selling merchandise - first selling the items for purchase value, buying a few extra and selling them for a bit more - is a great way to expand the webshop, and keep people interested in the VSPA franchise. - This year the Promotion Committee was supposed to promote the VSPA at a few occasions: during the masterdays, all four of the matching days (two college days and two test days), and at next study year’s VSPAcquaintance. The Promotion Committee was present at only one of the occasions mentioned above. The masterdays were at the same time as the Activities Committee’s movie night; one matching day was in the morning after the Great Gatsby Ball; two of the matching days took place during the study trip to Israel; and the last VSPAcquaintance was organised by Egbert, a few Promotion Committee members helped volunteer, but most of them were mentors in the Intreeweek, and could therefore not help. - Last year the board and the Promotion Committee decided that it was up to the Promotion Committee to help in the promotion of Weekend Getaway, because this activity is organized by the board and they probably could use the help, due to their busyness at the end of the year. This year Anna and Robin had the responsibility over the organization of Weekend Getaway, at which they did a great job. They did not really need the help of the Promotion Committee in the promotion of said weekend, which was fully booked on the very first day. Nevertheless Anna and Robin did mention that they were not fully aware that the promotion of the Weekend Getaway was part of the Promotion Committee’s tasks, and would have liked the help the committee could have offered.

All in all it has been quite a tough year for the Promotion Committee. They often found themselves looking for things to do and ways to get involved in the promotion of the VSPA. They even created a project in which different members of the committee had the task of searching for ways to improve the different social channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the website. Though this did give them some work to stay busy, it proved to be a hard project with not many concrete results and changes in the way the VSPA uses its social media.

In an evaluation of the committee with the board we concluded that, though it is great to have group of VSPA enthusiasts who enjoy investing more time in the association, the committee itself is quite unnecessary. Most of their activities in the year can be picked up by the board, and adding a party between the board and the committees proved to complicate things by making them more unclear for CAOs.

In an evaluation with the Promotion Committee the committee mentioned most of these points as well: the committee felt like they did not have many clear tasks and felt as if the board only gave them the assignments the board did not want to do themselves. In the

evaluation meeting the Promotion Committee agreed that the committee did not have to be dissolved next year. However, it did need to undergo some substantial changes. According to the committee the next board should discuss which tasks they deem necessary to be carried out by a similar committee, and which tasks they want to take on themselves. This year the Promotion Committee gathered once a week, if their job package is reduced less meetings would be necessary. Making meetings feel less contentless, which will probably benefit the members of the Promotion Committee.

If the next board does decide to dissolve the Promotion Committee, it is important that they consider the tasks that were under the Promotion Committee’s responsibility, and decide whether they want to do them with the board, delegate them to another committee, or not do them at all.

7.2. Simmer Committee The Simmer Committee had the task of preparing delicious meals for during GMAs. At the end of last year, the Simmer Committee became an official committee. Thus this year was the first year to see how this would really work. Unfortunately, it was not as big as a success as we hoped and we think this is mostly a consequence of low commitment of the members. At the beginning of the year, we decided it would be best for this committee to have as many members as possible, as we thought it would be best to have plenty of helping hands to help at different GMAs. This way, not everyone would have to help at every GMA. Unfortunately, this meaning that it was easier to cancel, it led to the fact that more people would do so. Most times, there were around 3 or 4 people left to help, and we would often have to ask around even outside of the committee for people who would like to help. Once, we could not even find enough people and had to order pizza instead. We think this low turnout could also have to do with the number of first year students in the committee. At the beginning of the year, the Simmer Committee existed of around 13 members, most of which were first year students who enjoy cooking but do not have much affinity with the VSPA. The Simmer Committee is not just about cooking, but much more about being involved with the VSPA, enthusiasm to visit GMAs and genuinely liking to help the VSPA and its members. Lots of these first years did not quite check all these boxes and although they had fun helping from time to time, they were not involved enough to bring the committee to a real succes. This led us to think that maybe the Simmer Committee would be better off not as a committee, but more as a group of VSPA enthusiasts who are excited to help out and enjoy cooking for GMAs with their friends.

Another option is to give the committee more to do than just cook for GMAs, so that members would have to be more involved. Possibilities such as organising a walk in dinner could be explored. Even then, we would not recommend having more than seven members in the committee, as we think this restrains the amount of commitment, and ideally finding members who are interested in the VSPA and its GMAs.

7.3. Editorial Committee Six newsletters have been made this year. At the beginning of the year we invented different things to use in the newspaper. You can think about columns, recipes, wise sayings, and household tips. From here we have chosen a few for every newspaper because we did not want to make it too long to read. The column was a fixed returning item that was very well received. Furthermore, VSPA activities were promoted in each newspaper and sometimes there was promotion for a company, arranged through acquisition. We planned a seventh newspaper but due to a malfunction of the website (mailchimp.com), where the newsletters are made, this newsletter was not made. Six newsletters (each two months) was perfect and we also recommend this for the next board.

7.4. Friday Afternoon Borrel Committee Last study year the VSPA started organizing FABs in collaboration with a few UvA staff members. In the beginning the board had full responsibility over the organization and execution of the borrels. Later on they decided to involve a few enthusiastic members, which meant the birth of a new committee: the FAB Committee. This year we decided that it would be a good idea to carry on with this approach. We decided that - contrary to our committee policy - it would be a good idea to not handle a maximum amount of (7) committee- members, in the philosophy of ‘the more, the merrier’. Therefore the committee consisted of 10 members. Although it was nice to have a lot of helping hands, it was quite a hard committee to get off the ground. Probably due to the fact that the FABs do not take place often and do not take much preparation. The timing of the borrels was also pretty inconvenient for students: most of them took place in exam weeks or the day after a VSPA borrel, which probably had a big effect on the amount of students visiting the FABs. This, in its turn, meant that most of the committee members experienced organizing borrels, not for their peers, but for UvA staff members. All of this made it pretty hard to motivate most committee members to take action, be present at meetings, or even fill in the datumprikkers.

This does not mean that a committee for the FABs is a bad idea. It means that it has proven to be significantly harder to motivate the committee and keep its members engaged. Here is a list of our experiences turned into tips, that might help realize this goal next year: - The timing of the borrels is key. Not just for the popularity among students, but for the rate of involvement of the committee as well. Exam weeks, busy VSPA weeks and the day after VSPA borrels should be avoided at all times. Although planning the borrels is hard, these factors should be taken into account to avoid empty borrels. - Do not follow the philosophy of ‘the more, the merrier’. This year this resulted in social loafing and lots of absence from a lot of committee members. A smaller committee is not only more efficient, but probably also more motivated. In case this results in a FAB with a shortage of available committee members to help, the board or some other active VSPA members will be probably more than happy to help out. After all the work is not hard and you do not need any experience in the committee, but it just needs to be done! - Try keeping the committee active. Although small tasks like calling Brouwerij ‘t IJ to order might seem marginal and easy enough to be done by the CAO, it is probably

better to delegate this to the committee members. All of this may sound pretty self- evident, but should not be overlooked. - Try making the FABs more popular among students. Never underestimate the importance of good promotion! Give students a reason to go to the UvA if they are not already there; give them a reason to stay if they are. Cheap (special)beers, cocktails and other offers are a way to do this. One of the things that has proven to work pretty good this year was sending an email to the teachers/tutors who give classes on the friday of a FAB, asking them to show a certain promotion slide or at least mention the FAB. This year we had many tutorial groups (including tutors) visiting the FAB after a class.

C. Ongoing Policy

1. General Thank-yous

Throughout the year we have some traditional ways of thanking the active member of the association. You can read about these below.

1.1. Weekend Getaway Each year, it is tradition for the board to organise a weekend getaway as a way to thank active members of the VSPA. This year, Anna and Robin took the organisation of this weekend upon themselves. Once again it was a lovely weekend full of old fashioned fun, games, drinking, dancing, campfires and much more. For many years, the VSPA has visited the Loryann, a ranch in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. We looked into the possibilities of renting another house, but ended up at the same location as it is pretty ideal in terms of price, location, space and facilities. The weekend went pretty smoothly. In preparation, Anna and Robin arranged location, groceries, promotion, technique, DJ’s and a bus for transport of all equipment. For tickets, we regulated discounts for our most active members. Members who were in a committee and had visited at least two GMAs paid €25,- for the weekend, members who met one of these requirements paid €35,-, and all other members paid €45,-. Furthermore, committee members could sign up for the event a few days before other members could, as the weekend is firstly meant as a thank you to them. The weekend turned out to be more popular than we thought, causing it to be sold out after this first round. Subsequently, we looked into options to bring more people and ended up bringing everyone on the waiting list as well. To have this fit in the original budget, these extra participants had to pay €10,- more than the original price category they would fall under. In the last week, there were quite some cancellations, but we were happy to at least be able to bring everyone. This resulted in a total of 57 attendees.

For promotion, we used a lot of pictures of the weekend in past years. We think this was quite effective: it was a nice way to paint a picture for members who were not yet familiar with the weekend.

For groceries, we made up an order list for the original amount of participants (60). At the end of the weekend a lot of groceries remained. We especially had ordered too much beer. Fortunately we were able to return all unopened groceries to the supermarket so we did not have to throw anything out. However, it did result in a high surplus. This is something that often happens with the grocery list. It is quite hard to make a good estimate of what exactly you need in food and drinks. For future years we recommend paying extra attention to the order list for groceries as to not waste food nor money of participants, perhaps by looking at results of previous years or trying to underestimate the amounts a little, as it always turns out to be more than expected.

All in all, the weekend and organisation beforehand went pretty smoothly. Anna and Robin enjoyed preparing everything and during the weekend the entire board acted responsible whenever necessary. We think the weekend was a success that we all enjoyed very much!

1.2. Thank-yous for Active Members Each year, the active members receive a little present from the board as a thank you for the effort they put in the VSPA: the VSPA Remembrance. This year, we have chosen for a custom made fabric bag with the VSPA logo and '17/'18 printed on it. In that bag, everyone found a pair of bath slippers with the VSPA logo and the text ‘Liefs, '17/'18’ (“Love, ‘17/’18) printed on it. We thought it was a very nice idea; unfortunately the slippers turned out to be kind of small and some people did not fit them. Tip: always ask for a sample when you order in big amounts! The presents were distributed during the last committee meetings in the last week and during the Eindborrel. We sent an email to our active members in order to let them know that they could pick up their present at the VSPA room. We had a list of all the active members in the VSPA room so we could register who received the present yet and who didn’t. There is still an amount of presents left; we recommend to make sure that the presents ready to distribute by the end of May or the beginning of June. In that way you can distribute the presents during almost all of the committee meetings, which reduces the chance of waste of presents.

1.3. Birthday Cards For the past years it has been a tradition to send birthday cards to all active members (that is, members of committees). In the summer before our year we took a festive photo and printed the cards with this. Anna made up a calendar with the birthdays of all active members. Initially, we sent the cards by mail. However, we noticed that addresses in the members administration were often deprecated. Surely, students move more often than others so it is actually no surprise their addresses would quickly be outdated. This is why after a few months, we decided to deliver the cards in person during committee meetings. Next to the practical reason we liked the personal aspect of this.

During the whole year, it has been a struggle to deliver the birthday cards on time. As the year became busier it was harder for Anna to keep up, as writing these cards was often not priority number one. The downside of handing over cards in person was that it was less systematic. This is why cards would often lay around in the VSPA room because it was unclear who would give the card or when the member concerned had their next meeting. This only added to the backlog. Nearing the end of the year, we divided all the cards to be written amongst the six of us. This was more effective but also definitely not optimal. Although members were always happy to receive the cards, it would be a little uncomfortable to give them a card months after their birthday.

Writing birthday cards on time has been a struggle for the secretary for several years. This is why we recommend future boards to make a clear system for this, whether they decide to send the cards by mail or give them in person. Perhaps they can consider dividing the task from the beginning instead of making this the secretary’s responsibility, or they can make a

card with a standard message to make writing the cards less work. Bottom line is that is important to keep up with writing, to minimize the amount of work.

1.4. Closing Borrel This year, the closing borrel took place on the 29th of June in Het Huis van Iemand Anders, a cafe in the Van Woustraat. We had an own room with a bar that we could decorate in our own way. We contacted a lot of locations but this seemed to be the best option. We had a beer offer whereby people could get two beers for the price of one and a half, till a particular amount, The VSPA sponsored the other half of the second beer. We had cheese fingers, bitterballen and nachos for everyone around midnight. During the borrel the presents for the active members were distributed, the announcement of the VSPAwards winners took place and members could write down a memory/story/drawing in a guest book. The VSPAwards are elections held on Facebook with different categories at which the most votes lead to a winner. This is a tradition that has been going for a couple of years. We had a discussion whether we wanted to continue with this tradition because some of us had the opinion that it didn’t really match our focus point ‘accessibility’. Eventually, we chose a shorter version of the VSPAwards with just six categories instead of many more, so that it wouldn’t be the main theme of the closing borrel. The winner won a bottle of VSPA wine and a certificate. We thought the End of the year borrel was very gezellig and Het Huis van Iemand Anders was a nice location. However, the weather was really good but this location did not have a terrace.

2. General Members Assemblies

Below you can find a description of the subjects we discussed in each GMA we had this academic year.

2.1. Tuesday, Oktober 31, 2017 Application for General Members Assembly Committee This was the application by Iris Wierdsma for the position of secretary of the GMA Committee. She was approved and took over the task of her predecessor, Eva Sliedrecht.

Annual Report and Annual Result 2016/2017 This annual report and result were presented to the GMA by the board of 2016/2017. They were accepted by the GMA.

Policy Plan and Annual Budget '17/'18 This policy plan and annual budget were presented to the GMA by the board of '17/'18. Under a few conditions proposed by the CAC, which will be summed up under C.2.2. Tuesday, December 12, 2017, the pieces were accepted by the GMA. After this subject, the board of 2016/2017 was discharged and the board of '17/'18 was charged.

2.2. Tuesday, December 12, 2017 This GMA was originally planned on the 28th of November, but due to difficulties in finding applicants for both the AGC and the AC - mostly in finding former board members, it was rescheduled to the 12th of December.

Amendments Policy Plan and Annual Budget '17/'18 During this GMA, the first subject was the amended policy plan and annual budget. These changes were mostly financial. The CAC judged that a few calculations of income items, book sales, summary sales and income from FABs, were not correct. As a result, we had to correct these calculations and adjust the budget of some expense items.

Amendments to the Standing Regulations During this GMA, some motions were discussed, mostly for amendments to the SR. The first however was not a proposal for an amendment, but for a different interpretation to the existing words. This amendment was submitted by Merlijn and proposed to give a different interpretation to “one person without an active role within the association shall sit in the Application Committee” (SR, 3.4). Usually this entailed that someone who is no member of a committee, but is however a member of the association should apply. The proposal was to also include students who are not a member of the VSPA in this criterium. Nevertheless, this proposal was denied by the GMA, mainly because the proposed change was contentless; a way of interpreting cannot be captured in regulations.

The second motion was an amendment to the SR. It was submitted by Merlijn, Raz, Robin, Anna and Nina of the board and Vincent Schreuder and Anne Chatrou of the CAC. The amendment concerned the condition that a member or former member of the SB should be part of the AC (SR, 3.4). The proposed change was to omit the condition that also former members of the SB can apply, to strictly make it accessible for applicants in the sitting SB. This proposal was accepted. The reasons for this were mainly that the alleged greater supply of applicants was an illusion because thus far no former members of the SB are actually willing to apply. Also, the perceived possibility of the application of a former member of the SB decreases the feeling of responsibility in current members of the SB.

The final motion of this GMA was another amendment to the SR. This one proposed to make some changes concerning the categories of people in the AC (SR, 3.4). This motion was also submitted by Merlijn, Raz, Robin, Anna and Nina of the board and Vincent Schreuder and Anne Chatrou of the CAC. This section used to read:

“The Application Committee is chosen by the GMA and shall consist of five members. To know: a board member, a former board member, a Supervisory Board member, an active member and one person without an active role within the association.”

The goal was to loosen the requirements to form a AC. After discussing the amendment the final outcome was the acceptance of the change of the text above to the following:

"The Application Committee shall be elected by the General Members Assembly and shall consist of five members. The composition of those five members must meet the following requirements: - there shall be one current Board member on the Application Committee – no more and no less; - one person without an active role within the association shall sit on the Application Committee; - at least two people from the following three categories shall sit on the Application Committee – a former Board member, a Supervisory Board member and an active member.”

Applications for Application Guidance Committee '17/'18 After applying in front of the GMA, five people were eventually accepted as members of the AGC: Egbert and Nina of the current board and Vincent Schreuder, Nena Luttik and Richtsje Kurpershoek of the board of 2016/2017.

Applications for Application Committee '17/'18 After applying in front of the GMA, five people were eventually accepted as members of the AC: Merlijn of the current board, Lena van den Nieuwenhof and Ivar van Assen as active members, Nella Schrijver as member of the SB and Demi van der Helm as person without an active role within the association. The composition of this AC was valid as a result of the amendments explained in the above.

2.3. Tuesday, February 6, 2018 Proposal on Unanticipated Expenses After research by Egbert en Merlijn, there was a proposal to the GMA on unanticipated expenses. This proposal had two goals: (1) to change the budget for unanticipated expenses for the current policy and (2) to propose a new calculation for the budget for unanticipated expenses for future years. Both goals were achieved, for the proposal was accepted by the GMA. Below you can read how the research and the new calculation were done and also some directions on how to use this plan in the future.

Firstly, they took financial information over a period of ten years to ensure that the conclusion were somewhat general. There were two measures that needed to be estimated to say something about the necessary budget for unanticipated expenses. Firstly, there is the amount of money that has been used as a reservation for unanticipated expenses in every year. Usually, this was calculated by taking 8% of the income on the annual budget, added by 8% of the income on every event budget. For clarifying purposes, we call this measure ‘traditionally calculated unanticipated expenses’.

Secondly, the amount of superfluous money in every year must be determined. For this the annual results of the past ten years were looked upon. To determine how much money was superfluous the balance of each year was written down. Added to this was an estimate of the reactive expenses that had been done for that year. Reactive expenses are expenses that were

not budgeted for, but also not necessary. Reactive expenses are possible on event results but also on annual results. By adding the reactive expenses of a year to the balance on the annual result, you get the amount of money that was superfluous in that specific year. For clarifying purposes we call this measure ‘superfluous money’.

Now that the two measures are estimated, all you have to do is subtract the superfluous money from the traditionally calculated unanticipated expenses. What you get is the amount that was necessary to budget for unanticipated expenses in that specific year. By dividing this necessary budget for unanticipated expenses by the total income on the annual budget of that year, you get the percentage of it. The last step is to calculate the mean of the percentages from the last ten years. Because of this, we could make quite a good estimation of the percentage that we should apply. The percentage that came out was 3,47%, which we rounded up to 4%. The implications were that the traditional 8% of the annual budget could be scaled down to 4% and the traditional 8% of committee or event budgets could be eliminated entirely. These calculations can be found in the submitted pieces of concerned GMA.

We strongly recommend to also adopt this calculation of the unanticipated expenses in future years, but there are some comments that should be taken into account when doing this. First, it is very important to not make any reactive expenses. The calculation assumes that in some years there are losses and in other years there are profits. These two should balance out each other. When profits are systematically lower than expected, the balance is off and there is a loss in long term. The second thing that should be taken into account is that this just a calculation executed with limited data. We think it is best to evaluate the percentage of 4% every five years.

Proposal on Drug Policy This proposal, submitted by Raz, aimed to constitute a drug policy that could be included in the SR. During some VSPA events in recent years, there were some occasions in which illegal drug use occured. To prevent this from happening again, this proposal tried to provide the right regulatory tools to the sitting board. The contributed piece, the presentation by Raz and the discussion in the GMA that arose from it resulted in the addition of the tenth article in the SR, called Drug Policy.

Amendments to the Standing Regulations A list of small amendments, submitted by Merlijn, was also proposed to the GMA. Due to a lack of time, not all were accepted. Below is the list of proposed amendments that got accepted. Cursive words are added. - Some spelling errors were corrected; - 3.1: “A full-time Board member shall be regarded as someone spending 40 hours per week (not including holidays) on the VSPA.” - 3.2: “The Supervisory Board shall comprise a maximum of five members and shall be elected by the General Members Assembly.” - 3.4: ‘as elaborated in article 0’ was removed.

- 3.6 and 6.1: ‘GMA minuter’ was changed to ‘GMA secretary’. - 3.6: “In the event of the absence of general members, a one-off General Members Assembly chair or General Members Assembly secretary may be appointed with the approval of the General Members Assembly.” - 4 and 4.1: ‘the committee overview’ was changed to ‘the committee policy, which is part of the policy plan’. - 4.2: Committees may be dissolved in two situations: (1) if the Board decides by a majority vote when preparing the committee policy not to restart the committee in the next academic year; or (2) if a committee is inactive during the academic year and its members have no interest in reforming it. - 4.3: mentions of the committee regulations were removed. - 5: ‘the body that convenes the concerned GMA’ was changed to ‘the General Members Assembly Committee’. - 7.4.4: “The number of months awarded to the Board for Board activities by the University of Amsterdam shall be distributed equally among the Board members up to a maximum of 12 months per Board member.” - 8.1: ‘room regulations’ was changed to ‘policy plan’. - A.2: ‘planning and chairing the General and Committee Council’ is omitted from the description of the specific board tasks of the CAO. - A.2: the position of the secretary as the vice chair of the editorial committee is omitted.

2.4. Tuesday, April 3, 2018 This GMA was originally planned on the 13th of March, but due to some unexpected changes in the processing of the accounting system, we had to reschedule this GMA.

Applications for First-year Coordination Committee 2018/2019 After applying in front of the GMA, five people were eventually accepted as members of the FCC: Aimee Diepgrond, Hannah van der Laan, Loïs Riemens, Lynn Haasloop Werner and Max de Vries.

Half-year Result and Working Budget '17/'18 The writing of these pieces did not go entirely as planned. Firstly, we experienced some difficulties with our planning for processing the accounting system. We had not thought through that the processing of the accounting system needed to be finished completely before we could start writing. After rescheduling the GMA to the 3rd of April, we could fix this in time. However, even after that, we had quite some trouble with the calculations of some income items. As a result of that also the expenses had to be rearranged. Eventually we managed to correct the calculations in time. There was also a discussion about the loss we made in the trip to Lille. You can read more about this under ‘F.5.7.22 Trip Committee’. Nevertheless, the GMA accepted the HYR and the Working Budget.

2.5. Tuesday, May 1, 2018 Proposal on Candidate Board 2018/2019

This GMA the AC proposed the following candidate board: - Ayra Gerlach (chair) - Dax Herman (secretary) - Shy-Ann Moehamatdjalil (treasurer) - Pauline Claes (social CAO and vice chair) - Ruby Manten (study related CAO) - Daan Heijke (officer of sales and acquisition) The GMA accepted this proposal.

Amendments to the Standing Regulations During this GMA, a few amendments to the SR were discussed. Below you can read about the three proposals that got accepted.

Firstly, there was a proposal, submitted by Merlijn and Vincent Schreuder, to amend article 5.2 of the SR. The concerned sentence used to say “... the Application Committee will usually conduct two interviews with the candidates.” This sentence was criticized, because it does not obligate the AC to follow these directions. The GMA judged that the SR should only consist of obligations and not have these kind of sentences that only provide a description of what is usual. As a result, the amendment of this sentence to “the Application Committee is responsible for the application procedure” was accepted by the GMA.

The second proposed amendment was submitted by the entire board. It meant to change article 10 of the SR. In this version’s SR, article 10.2 was titled Blacklist and all other mentions also referred to 10.2 as Blacklist. As a board, we judged that a ‘Blacklist’ and how it is used in everyday speech, is quite different from what is defined in article 10.2. We proposed to change every reference to the Blacklist to ‘the Druglist’. This amendment was accepted by the GMA.

There were also some proposed amendments that were not accepted. Firstly there were two proposals about the job profile of the officer of sales and acquisition, which were not accepted due to stranded discussions about the alternative. There was also a proposed amendment to the voting procedure of elections with more candidates than positions. This proposal had to be skipped due to lack of time.

2.6. Tuesday, May 22, 2018 Applications for General Members Assembly Committee 2018/2019 After applying in front of the GMA, two people were eventually accepted as members of the GMA Committee: Iris Wierdsma (chair) and Loïs Riemens (secretary).

Applications for Supervisory Board 2018/2019 After applying in front of the GMA, four people were eventually accepted as members of the SB: Egbert, Anna, Maaike Renalda and David Voss.

Applications for Cash Audit Committee 2018/2019

After applying in front of the GMA, three people were eventually accepted as members of the CAC: Robin, Luc Roeffen and Felix Blom.

Proposal on Insurances Egbert and Nina made a proposal to the GMA about the insurances of the association. The eventual result was that the GMA accepted to cancel these insurances for this year and the years to come. You can read more about the reasons for this decision under ‘Financial Policy, 5.1.9’.

2.7. Monday, June 18, 2018 Application for General Members Assembly Committee 2018/2019 After applying in front of the GMA, Egbert was added to the GMA Committee as a general member.

Proposal on Equity Capital Egbert and Merlijn made a proposal to the GMA about the regulations concerning the equity capital of the association. Firstly, they proposed the addition of a clause to article 7.4.2 of the SR, that would say that in the annual account also the following must be mentioned: “(1) the equity capital of the association and (2) what the minimal amount of the equity capital needs to be, substantiated by a calculation.” This proposal was accepted by the GMA.

Secondly, they proposed a calculation that can be used to determine the minimal amount of the equity capital. Below, this calculation will be explained briefly. The idea is that the equity capital should serve three goals and has therefore three functions: (1) transacting function, (2) financing function and (3) buffering function. The transacting function is for making payments. It is estimated by subtracting the lowest total balance in a certain year from the equity capital. The financing function is for reserving money to be able to replace certain fixed assets, whenever necessary. It is estimated by determining the purchase value of all belongings that should be replaced at the cost of the VSPA when they break down. The buffering function is for taking in unanticipated expenses. It is estimated by taking 20 % of the revenue that is made in one year. As a result, the necessary minimum equity capital is the sum of the three functions.

The GMA accepted this calculation as sufficient to determine the minimum of the equity capital. It is advisory to use this calculation for future determinations of the minimal amount of the equity capital. Furthermore, the calculation was added to the transmission document of the board’s treasurer.

Proposal on Function Profile Sales and Acquisition Merlijn and Raz made a proposal to the GMA about the function profile of the officer of sales and acquisition. The old profile was thought to be to extensive and specific. As a result of this specificiality, there were quite some provisions that were no longer correct as a result of changes in contracts with book sales partners and such. To provide a more general and therefore more long lasting description, they proposed the following function profile: “Is

responsible for the sales of the association in the broadest sense of the word. This can be: (1) goods, (2) services. Is also responsible for the acquisition of the association in the broadest sense of the word.” This alternation was accepted by the GMA.

Establishment of Translated Documents In preparation of next year’s internationalisation, the board proposed translations of VSPA’s official documents: the Charter and the SR. These documents were translated by translating office Metamorfose Vertalingen at the expenses the GS of Psychology. To get a generally agreed upon translation of certain terms, the board wanted to have these translations approved by the GMA. Before voting, the GMA had the opportunity to make amendments to the document. Most amendments were too small to mention here, but can of course be read back in the minutes of the GMA. However, the amendment to the translation of “commissaris” is one worth mentioning. Eventually the GMA agreed upon the terms “committee affairs officer (CAO)” and “officer of sales and acquisition”. After the amendments the translations were accepted by the GMA. These documents can now be found on the website.

Proposal on Translations After the subject above was accepted, Merlijn made a proposal to the GMA about regulations regarding the translated documents. This proposal contained an addition of an eleventh article to the SR, titled ‘English version’, which read the following sentences: “The Charter and the Standing Regulations both have an English version. These versions only remain translations and are therefore not legally valid. An amendment to the English version of the Charter or the Standing Regulations can only be made by decision of the General Members Assembly. An amendment to the English version of the Charter or of the Standing Regulations is done by a simple majority of the votes cast. An amendment to the original Dutch Charter and Standing Regulations can only be submitted in combination with a proposed translation of the English version.” The proposal was accepted by the GMA.

Proposal on Voting Procedure Merlijn made a proposal to the GMA about the elections for groups with more candidates than positions. This procedure is written down in appendix B.3 of the Standing Regulations. This proposal was done to adverse unnecessary complexity of the voting procedure and to counteract ‘tactical voting’. After some amendments resulting from the discussion, appendix B.3 was changed to the following and thereafter accepted by the GMA: “In the event that the number of candidates standing for election (N) is greater than the number of positions available (x), the election shall take place as follows. First, the number of positions available and the number of candidates that will therefore have to be dropped need to be established, where applicable by voting. Subsequently, each voting member will indicate - on a single ballot paper - one of the following two options for each candidate: (1) for; (2) against. These two options can be indicated as often as the voting member wishes. In case a voting member does not vote ‘for’

or ‘against’, there are also the possibilities of abstaining or casting a blank vote. However, these are only possible for the entire voting procedure, not for individual candidates. Candidates will then be ranked based on the number of "for" votes. An election of a candidate will be valid if the candidate meets the following two conditions: (1) at least half of all the voting members present at the General Members Assembly have voted "for" or "against" the candidate; (2) there are more votes ‘for’ than ‘against’ and (3) the candidate is one of the x candidates with the most "for" votes. In other words, if there are six candidates and four positions, the candidate will be one of the four candidates to have received the most "for" votes. Should two or more candidates have obtained exactly the same number of preference scores, leaving the outcome of the election unresolved, a second election shall be held only for the candidates with the same scores.”

3. Former Members Reunion

This year, we also organised a reunion for former members of the VSPA. This was done in cooperation with Alumni association Spectra. Instead of throwing the usual ‘borrel’ for former members, we organised a barbecue this year. This was a good alternative. Promotion was done by Spectra and lead to a decent attendance rate of about 40 people. A persistent problem, however, is the difficulty to reach former members after they have stopped studying. We think it is important to come up with a structural plan for this problem.

4. VSPA Room

4.1. Opening Hours The opening hours as described in our policy plan have mostly been followed throughout the year. Every now and then we closed earlier due to activities. Every Sunday we would post a message on our Facebook wall mentioning any differences in opening hours for the next week, so our members would always know in time. During the ski trip to Valmeinier and the study trip to Tel Aviv we asked some of our most active members (former board members, members of our advisory bodies, or closest friends) to help out a few times so the VSPA room could be open for at least one hour every day to sell summaries. On some occasions, we would also ask one of them to ‘babysit’ the room for just an hour or so, for instance when we had an extra board meeting. This worked quite well, although the first few times, the selling of summaries would not go as smoothly regarding keeping track of sales and saving receipts for the pin machine. We then tried to intercept this by making a handy guide (titled ‘selling summaries for dummies’). This helped, and we were very thankful to be able to leave the room in good hands.

4.2. Room Policy In our policy plan we described how we wanted to emit a welcoming atmosphere in the VSPA room, yet have it remain calm enough for the board and for members to work and study there. We tried to welcome everyone who entered and to always offer them a drink. This was first and foremost the responsibility of the board member on room duty, but

everyone was to help in creating an open atmosphere. We think this goal was achieved. A couple of times in the year we had to remind each other of this importance. As you get busier as a board member it becomes tempting to pay less attention to members visiting the room and to just focus on your work. However, we were able to motivate each other to keep doing this and we feel that people always felt welcome to visit the VSPA room.

Sometimes, the VSPA room got too busy to get much work done. This aspect of the goal was not always as successful. However, this was mostly during ‘rush hours’, in the afternoon when lots of members finished class. The morning always remained peaceful enough to work.

At the beginning of the year we were in possession of a (borrowed) PlayStation. This game console was lots of fun but also a threat to the peace and quiet in the room. After a few months, former board member Vincent needed his TV back, which he had left there after his year. With it, the ability to play on the PS went away. Although we were sad to lose it, it was probably better for the productivity in the room.

4.3. Cleaning Because the VSPA room was always so gezellig, it would easily become a mess. This had to do with us, but also with visiting members who would often not clean their dishes and such. We tried to clean up regularly but as the year grew busier the motivation to spend a lot of time on this grew shorter. Along with this it could sometimes be frustrating to spend a morning cleaning the room and leave it messy by 6PM.

To clean the room more structurally, we occasionally held a cleaning day. Once we even closed for the entire day to really clean out all the cabinets and threw out all things we did not really need anymore. This was very effective! Next to this, we often used some time of our Wednesday morning meetings to all clean the room together. We felt it was important to keep the room as clean as possible, to remain a professional imago to the UvA and to the cleaners of the UvA, who would only vacuum our floor if it was free enough. We would recommend future boards to really clean the room from to time, as the mess always tends to build up quickly. A tip: make a schedule!

5. Special Activities

5.1. Constitution Borrel We wanted to organize a nice Constitution Borrel (COBO) and attend as many other COBOs as possible. With this we hoped to keep the ties with other boards in good shape. In our opinion, our COBO was a great success. We invited former VSPA boards, our advisory bodies, our brothers from the Faculty Association of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FA-SBS), our sisters (other psychology associations) from all over the country and also other associations from Amsterdam that are not part of our faculty.

On the downside, our COBO took too long and some boards had not been with us before the end. To make up for this, we have organized an 'excuse' borrel with the remaining budget. This excuse borrel was located in the Common Room. We payed some beers to compensate for the long unnecessary waiting.

Organizing our own COBO was great fun. Also visiting the other COBOs was very nice. It has led to a very good relationship with the other associations. It does cost a lot of energy though. There are weeks in which you drink alcohol every night and stay up late. Each board must decide for themselves whether they find the benefits worth it.

5.2. Committee Evening XXL This year we reintroduced one of the most exciting nights of the year: the committee evening XXL. This event was introduced by the board of 2014/2015 as an extra way to thank the active members. In advance we asked all committee members who were available on the scheduled date. We then arranged them so that there were ten groups consisting of people from different committees. We did this in an effort to introduce people to active members from other committees. It is hard to say if this resulted in long term friendships between members of different committees, but it was a great way to at least get them to meet. We appointed one team leader per group and gave them the assignment to create a group chat and use it to invent a team name. This could earn them valuable bonus points.

The location where the committee evening took place was the Mirror Centre. This location was relatively cheap, located at 10 minutes walking time from Roeterseiland, and the owners did not mind if we brought our own consumptions. As cherry on the icing it also featured refrigerators to keep the beers cool.

The participants did not have to pay any participation costs, because we found this a bit unfair for an evening that was meant to thank our active members for their efforts. However, people did have to pay for their drinks: €0,50 for soda €1,- for beer and €1,50 for wine. Afterwards we went to Bar Botanique, a café nearby that had kept some space free for us. The Committee Evening XXL consisted of a few different games, meant to connect the members and break the ice between them. They competed against the other teams for a much desired prize. With the profit we made on the sale of drinks, we financed the first prize: a dinner for the winning team, cooked by the board. This winner-dinner was a great evening; both the board and the winning team enjoyed it very much!

A small side note to add to this pretty successful event is the fact that we bought to many snacks and drinks, which we could not return after the event had ended (it was after 22:00). We decided to store them in the storage in Anna’s house, to return on another day. We forgot to do that.

A lesson to be learned from this occurrence is that it is really important to get an estimate of the amount of food and drinks needed that is as realistic as possible. If you do find yourself in

a position where you are probably gonna be left with remaining condiments, let one or two board members return them to the supermarket before 22:00.

6. General Promotion

Regarding the general promotion we have distributed VSPA notebooks. We also created new VSPA banners.

Making the notebooks has succeeded. Although we distributed them on multiple occasions, we still have quite some spares in our storage. Fortunately, the notebooks are not made specifically for our year, so they can still be used in the coming years. In addition, Merlijn created two beautiful general promotional banners, one with a little more focus on the social side and one on the study related side. He also made a general VSPA banner. All three banners are in English - or without any text on it - so we can use them the next years. We also made quite beautiful sweater/hoodies! We sold them for cost price, around €16,-. We sold 157 sweaters/hoodies, which is very many. It was possible as a result of good design and good promotion.

Making the gadget takes a lot of time and can be a good promotion. Make sure that when you come up with a gadget, that the entire board supports it and that there is a plan for what you want to do with the gadget. This policy aimes to minimize waste.

7. Website

7.1. Finalising Transition As described in our policy plan we started the year with a new website, which was not completely finished and working at the beginning of the year. There were still some technical problems for which Anna would maintain contact with Eerste Hulp Bij WordPress (EHBWP), the business that developed the site for us. Unfortunately, there are still some problems with the site today. This is the result of a disappointing cooperation with EHBWP. As it is a sole proprietorship and the owner has had many personal problems this year, business was not as fast has hoped. We are working hard to finish these problems together with the owner so the website will be fully functional at last, but this has not been easy this year. In hindsight, maybe we should have switched to another company to solve the final issues. However, since the owner built this website for us entirely, he knows how it works like no other, making it easier for him to help us. He is also very friendly and helpful and has helped us with many practical things this year, even though some of the bigger things are still unfinished. We were always welcome to ask him things about specific workings of the site, which we considered valuable, making it hard to switch to another company. Still, it is problematic that some things still need to be fixed.

Other than these issues still being active, we were able to use the website for many things this year. A big advantage was being able to sell tickets for events via the website. Another was

registering members via direct debit (see C.8 Direct debit). All in all the site does look functional and professional to members visiting.

Another part of finalising the transition of websites is that we still had to add most content at the beginning of the year. The content of the old site was not transferred and a lot of it was outdated. That is why we divided this among the board and we all wrote new content for the website. Anna then placed the content on the right pages. This was done in the first few months.

7.2. Use of the Website As described in the policy plan, Anna would mostly be in charge of keeping the website up- to-date. This went all right with the exception of the photo gallery, which is explained further on. As we use a WordPress website it is very easy in use. This is why Anna was able to distribute some of the tasks later in the year. Raz managed the job vacancies page, as he was in contact with the businesses we figured it made more sense if he would add the vacancies to the site. Later in the year the CAOs Egbert and Nina would add events by their committees themselves, which also made sense because they would add these on Facebook as well. Anna still remained in charge of the rest of the site, including ticket sales and members administration. She made some manuals for the website so the rest of the board (mostly Raz, Egbert and Nina as mentioned before) could easily navigate throughout the website if they needed to. With the dividing of tasks, the feeling of responsibility would sometimes also be divided, resulting in unclarity about who was in charge of what. Subsequently, some events were not published on time on the site. We also had to learn a system regarding news entries on the main page of the site. After a few months, we had a meeting about this and talked about what would and would not be mentioned in these entries. We decided it would be nice to keep the main page active and post about just about anything. Anna made a manual for posting these entries so everyone of the board could publish them. We wrote entries about upcoming events, about other matters in the VSPA that we wanted to promote, and a few times, members of the Promotion Committee wrote reports on past events, which we thought was really fun. We recommend future boards to keep the homepage up-to-date and as lively as possible, to directly give members a warm welcome on the site! To do this and to prevent this ‘divided responsibility’ feeling, we recommend making a clear distribution of task, and to consider the website equally important as the Facebook page.

7.3. Attractiveness to Members The new clean look of the website was thought to improve the attractiveness to members. We think this did indeed happen to some extent. In the beginning of the year we would get some complaints because there were more technical problems then, such as ticket sales not working. However this decreased later on and we heard positive sounds about the website coming from our members. Because of the cleaner layout, the site looks a lot more professional and user friendly, and we’ve heard positive things about this. This feedback makes us think that we did succeed in making the site more attractive to members. The new functions of the site also led more people to the site. This is mostly referring to ticket sales: everyone who wanted to attend one of our events visited the site to buy a ticket. Next to this,

we wanted to attract people to our site by publishing photos of activities here. Unfortunately the photo gallery is still not functional, due to personal problems at EHBWP. Because of this we decided to derogate from our plan to publish more photos on the website and less on Facebook, because we thought it would look unprofessional. Hence, we published all photos on Facebook this year. This is unfortunate but EHBWP is working on getting the photo gallery on the website fully functional as soon as possible. The new board is also aware of this situation.

7.4. Maintenance Our plan to record little errors on the site and possibly having them fixed by another company went a little different than planned. This because we are still finishing the transition with EHBWP. Any errors that occurred were quickly picked up and fixed by Robert because we were still in contact with him. However, there were costs involved in this as these services fell under the hosting agreement we have with him. But the advantage was that these little errors could quickly be fixed instead of having to record them and fix many at one time.

Another part of maintenance was our plan to translate the website. This project has been successfully finished by now. The process of this project is described in A1.1.2.1., ‘Translating promotional channels’.

7.5. For the Future This was not an easy year for the website. Because the project was not completely finished by the end of our year, we made sure to fully inform the new board about the whole situation. We recommended them to seriously think about the options, and to consider looking for a new website operator or making clearer agreements with EHBWP. We hope they can learn from our experiences from this year, and to continue making the website perfect! Because all in all, we are happy to have the new site and we have benefited from many of its functions, like the usability (both in the front- and backend), the direct debit, the active homepage and the ticket sales and we can definitely say the new website is a huge improvement compared to the old one.

8. Direct Debit

From this year on the memberships will go through a direct debit and this has had its advantages and disadvantages. A direct debit means that if someone joins the VSPA, every consecutive year around that same date an amount will be debited so that this person remains a member until after three years, because the bachelor normally is three years, or earlier when one no longer wants this and actively terminates their membership. This was very easy with a Dutch system, iDeal, which was served bij Molly.nl. However there were also some students with other, foreign, banks that could not pay using iDeal. Fortunately this was solved quite easily and it was also possible to pay with the other foreign banks. Sometimes there was a fault when someone wanted to pay and the person had to come back later to finish the payment. In the end all unpaid memberships where paid. In the end we are satisfied with the

direct debit because, also with the disadvantages, it makes everything easier, specifically for the treasurer.

9. Storage Spaces

Another project we looked at during this year, was the structural improvement of the use of our storage spaces. The association has two storage spaces on the Roeterseiland Campus. One in the G building (G S.62A) and one in the B building (B3.48). To improve the efficiency, we first made a strict selection of items that should be stored in these rooms. After this was done, we mapped out which items were stored in which storage. We wrote this down on a physical sheet and attached it to the door. We did this in both storages. We called these our storage inventories. We also wrote these items down and put them in a digital file on the server. This way, it is very easy to always have knowledge about where to find the items that are stored in the storages.

There are two important things that should be taken into account for future boards. First, it is essential to always think about which things should be stored and which things have another purpose. It is very seductive to throw all kinds of stuff in the storage, but the problem is that this will cause that you will never be able to reach things that are stored a bit further to the back. As a result, the storage space is devalued to a large trash bin of things that might be of use in the future.

The next thing that is essential to take into account is that the storage inventories should be updated after each time you take something out of the storage or store in something new. Do not forget to also update the digital lists, because these are very useful too.

To evaluate this project, we think it has been a difficult task to always adhere to the policy, because you do not always have enough time to think about the two subjects that are mentioned above. We recommend to also schedule some tidying days throughout the year.

10. Insurances

Since the year of 2008/2009 the VSPA has spent €1.932,25 per year on insurances: €1.633,50 on the event insurance and €298,75 on the contents insurance. This year we decided to review these expenditures and see if they are being used properly. We did an extensive analysis and finally came to the conclusion that we no longer needed these insurances.

First of all, we have a small inventory of little value and the event insurance had little connection with our association.

Second of all, during our project, it appeared that the UvA has an insurance policy that applies to study associations as well. The UvA insurance is meant for the entire organization and all underlying institutions; study associations as well. This insurance covers the same content as the two insurances the VSPA was paying for. This showed that we were double

insured: both by the UvA and by our own insurances. The big difference of the UvA insurance from our own insurances is that the own risk with the UvA is higher. This contains €25.000 for our contents insurance and €10.000 for the event insurance/liability. If the VSPA is liable for damages of €100.000,-, then we must pay €10.000 and the UvA pays the remaining €90.000,-. For the other insurance applies the fact that we definitely don’t pass the €10.000,- with our contents.

In addition, we have a very high equity capital that could cover some of these own risks. The equity capital comes down to an amount of approximately €85.000,-, which gives us enough financial space to cover the own risk of the UvA insurances. In the last ten years we didn’t use the insurances, except for the stolen computers in ‘16/’17.

We found enough reasons to cut off our existing insurances. For all information concerning insurances, look in the server under '17/'18 board member Nina Somer (in Dutch).

D. External and Internal Contacts

1. External Contacts

1.1. Youtopia/New Partners

1.1.1 The Partnership This Year The VSPA has been partners with Youtopia for a few years already. New this year was the cooperation not only on the part of exam trainings, but also on the part of summaries. Youtopia started providing summaries for the first time this year. Because this field was new to them, things did not always go as smoothly as hoped. As a result of several factors, such as trouble finding writers or bad communication with the printer’s, summaries would often come in later than expected, and we would sometimes get complaints about the quality of them: they contained spelling errors and sometimes explanations were unclear. Due to the new collaboration, there were no clear agreements yet about promotion at the beginning of the year. For exam trainings, Youtopia would offer us a promotion schedule, but for summaries, planning promotion was our own responsibility, which we did not quite understand in the beginning. These factors made up for a bit of a rough start. However, we do not mean to say the cooperation was bad necessarily. Although we did make the decision to not extend the contract with Youtopia, it was definitely nice to work together with a business that we had been in cooperation with for several years: both parties know better what to expect and how to keep eachother happy. For example, we had monthly evaluations planned throughout the year. Here, we would talk about promotion and cooperation issues for every period, and look at the results (how many people signed up for trainings, how happy we were with the summaries, etc.). It was nice to do this on a regular basis so possible problems could be addressed quickly. However, the mentioned problems regarding summaries proved hard to be fixed. On the matter of exam trainings, there were little to no problems throughout the year. Member signups for trainings were consistent throughout the year, and we always received positive feedback from our members about the quality of the courses. One problem that occurred during the year came from the UvA: when the GS heard that we would book rooms on campus for Youtopia exam trainings, they told us this would no longer be possible for future years, as they would rather not have commercial parties such as Youtopia using UvA properties. We then had to take this into account for partnerships with exam trainers in the future. Because with Youtopia, prices would go up if we were not able to offer free spaces for the trainings, this was one of the reasons why continuing with Youtopia was not ideal for next year. In conclusion about this year’s partnership with Youtopia, the multiannual cooperation proved beneficial in our relationship with them. Concerning exam trainings, the partnership went well. Concerning summaries there was more trouble throughout the year, which we tried to fix during the second half (after discussing this in our HYR) by setting stricter deadlines and working at the promotion from our side. Still we would get complaints about the quality from our members, and delivery times would remain unstable. It was a disadvantage that both we as the board and Youtopia were new to making and selling summaries, and we would recommend future years to pay close attention to partnerships where a lot of matters are still going to be explored in the beginning. In these situations, it is

important to make clear agreements about responsibilities, to set clear deadlines and to evaluate regularly.

1.1.2. Contract Negotiations and Next Year’s Partnership(s) In 2015 the board extended the VSPA’s contract with Youtopia. Because this contract would automatically extend for another year in July 2018 we took on the project of orienting and negotiating a new contract, either with Youtopia or another partner. Our main goal was to find out whether the contract we had with Youtopia was still the best contract possible. Since December (2017) we have been in contact with a total of six companies (Youtopia not included) that offered exam trainings and/or summaries. We discussed what they had to offer and what we could mean for each other. Based on the first meeting with each company, we decided whether they were suitable for a potential partnership. For instance: some companies were unable to offer the materials in English, or could not guarantee trainings/summaries for every first- and (mandatory) second year course.

We then contacted the companies that we deemed fit and asked them to meet again to discuss business. In these second business we tried to concretize the potential cooperation by talking about things like: costs, members discounts and the provision for the VSPA. Based on these conversations we asked the companies to send us an offer.

Upon receiving these offers we compared them to each other and to the contract we have with Youtopia. After some negotiations we were left with one offer from Tentamentrainingen (for exam trainings) and one offer from Studentwiki (for summaries). We then contacted Youtopia to talk about a potential extension of the contract and the way the contract could be changed, because both the other offers looked to be more beneficial for both the VSPA and her members, than our current deal. Youtopia did send us a new offer, based on the other offers we discussed. This offer still was not as beneficial as the other two. Which - in combination with our dissatisfaction with the summaries this year, as mentioned before - lead us to terminate the contract at the end of this year.

Coming study year the VSPA will have signed a one-year contract with Tentamentrainingen for exam trainings and one for the same duration with Studentwiki. The reason we chose for a one-year contract, instead of a two-year one, is the fact that it gives you more freedom to change partners when things are not going as hoped or promised. It would be bad if a two- year contract is signed with a partner, and you would find out that things are not working out in the first half of the year; this would mean that you would be ‘stuck’ with an unfit partner for another year and a half.

1.2. Establishment of Study Associations Psychology in the Netherlands This year Merlijn and Robin were the contact persons with Establishment of Study Associations Psychology in the Netherlands (ESAPN). Last year the ESAPN aimed to meet once every six weeks. This was not found enough, so we have been meeting every month this year. This happened every time in another city. Merlijn and Robin could not be at every meeting because it was at some times during trips abroad. In the meetings the following

things were discussed: The conference, activities worth mentioning and tips. The conference: In cooperation with the ESAPN, the VSPA organizes the national psychology conference every year. All psychology study associations work together on this. Here a date, city, place and theme must be devised. After this, we look at speakers and workshops and the day classification. This year we did it in the form of TED Talks with many different speakers. Almost the entire VSPA board was at the conference and helped if necessary. There were fewer tickets sold than expected. Sadly there were only a few members of the VSPA present at the conference, despite the promotion.

Activities worth mentioning: In this round each association could mention activities that they liked very well so that other associations could draw inspiration from this and ask questions. Tips: Here the associations could ask questions to the other associations for tips about for example another book supplier, promotion and accounting systems. It is worth investigating whether organising this conference is of added value for the VSPA. In recent years, only a few members of the VSPA have been going to it, and still it has asked quite some time and effort of the VSPA board members. On the other hand, we think that it is a good means of staying in contact with other psychological study associations throughout the country, so it is worth debating if the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

In addition to being very busy with our own board tasks, the ESAPN is sometimes also a bit time-consuming, you usually lose a whole day when you have a meeting, but it is worth it. It is really great that you have the connections with the other study associations and you still try to set up a good, national, conference.

1.3. General Student Association Amsterdam The General Student Association Amsterdam (GSAA) is a very important union for the defending of the interests of all students in Amsterdam. However, we have not cooperated a lot with them throughout the year. Their monthly study association council was always planned during our board meetings, so we could not be present at those. From other associations we heard that these meetings were not very useful, so we do not think it is necessary to reschedule board meetings in future years. The one thing we do have contact about with them is their legal office. To this office we sent some questions about contracts throughout the year. Quite some times it took them much time to answer the questions, so it was not useful all the time. We do, however, recommend to keep contacting them about legal matters, because their advice might be of help in other years.

1.4. Studystore Last study year a two-year contract was signed with Studystore, an online bookseller. This year has been the first year of our partnership. For more concrete information about the course of events related to the book sales we would like to refer you to ‘E. Book Sales’. This paragraph will be limited to a report and evaluation of the contact with Studystore. In the early beginning of this study year the contact went quite laborious, due to some ambiguities in the function transmission, the fact that Raz was working a lot in the last month of the summer holiday and some complications with the accessibility of the contact person

assigned to us by Studystore. This resulted in quite some delay in releasing the the link of the book-webshop, which in turn might have had some effect on the book sales (again, for more information: E. Book Sales). In the first period some major problems appeared when the book Psychology by Gray suddenly turned out to be sold out at the publisher - this meant that some first years who ordered their books did not receive it until after their first exam. Although this was quite a setback, that could not be foreseen (by us and by Studystore) and has possibly had some influence in the book sales, Studystore was quick in their communication and tried keeping us updated as much as possible. After the first exam more books were published and all of the first years who ordered them received them. After this situation no other complications of the nature took place for the rest of the year. Some professors did decide to change their literature compared to the study guide during the year, and we did get some emails from members whose books were delivered damaged, but Studystore was always quick to respond and help us and our members out.

We sat down with Studystore twice this year: once in November and once in May. In our first evaluation we discussed the complications at the start of the year and the possibilities to improve the sales in the second semester and future years, like selling books as soon in the semester as possible; in the second evaluation meeting, which was also attended by Daan (Raz’ successor), we discussed the deadlines for next years book lists and the fact that our contact person got a new job. We will be assigned a new one for next year. Overall the partnership with Studystore was a pretty satisfying one. They are professional and quick to respond to questions and handle complications. The fact that nearly everything is done online - from the sales of the books to compiling the book lists - saves the Officer of Sales & Acquisition a lot of time and effort, which can be used to improve the promotion of the book sales and the acquisition. Studystore also provides members with an easy, cheap and convenient way to order their books and to know exactly when they can expect them at their doormat.

Some advice we would like to give our successors in the year(s) to come is to try to stay in contact with the bookseller (whether it’s Studystore, or another party). Due to the fact that a lot of work for the Officer of Sales & Acquisition is saved by digitizing nearly everything related to book sales, it has proven to be tempting to not be as involved as might be needed. We would recommend contacting Studystore more often than twice per year to receive updates about the book sales and to evaluate more often. They have a lot of experience with book sales across different associations across the country, so they might be able to provide you with some useful insight. Although the board does have access to the back office, where you can see all of the orders, this turned out to be quite unclear and hard to interpret. By staying in touch with Studystore it might be easier to have a comprehensive overview and focus the promotion on the areas it is needed. Lastly we recommend looking into the option of adding flyers to book orders. We did not use this possibility once this year, but it might be a great way to promote some big events at the start of different periods, so it is definitely worth looking into.

1.5. Sports Psychology This year, we prolonged our partnership with Lex Duvekot, who gives extracurricular courses on sports psychology. We received a fixed amount of money for each student we signed up for his course. We are, however, in doubt about the added value of this partnership. It costs a lot of promotional measures - messages on facebook and posters on our billboard during the important start of the year - to reach a sufficient number of students (six) to sign up. Also, the courses are quite expensive for students. On the other hand, the discount for members is quite high and acquisition remains scarce for a psychological association. Our recommendation for the future boards is not unambiguous, but we do think it is important to take a critical look at this partnership.

1.6. Section of Psychology Students of the Dutch Institute of Psychologists The SPS-DIP is a national psychology student platform and we worked actively with the UvA department. We wanted a good cooperation with the SPS-DIP both during the career day and in general. Jelmer Hoogland was chairman of the SPS-DIP at the UvA department and Egbert was his contact person within the board.

The career day was organized together with the SPS-DIP again. This went fairly well. The national board of SPS-DIP tried to exert a lot of influence on this day, but with the UvA department it was easy to collaborate. Because they are an extra party to interfere with the activity, it is a little more difficult, but this has been taken care of well by making clear agreements. An important agreement was that we would both deliver half of the lectures, workshops and companies. Apart from the career day cooperation we had hardly any other collaborations. Jelmer sat at the SCP and because of this we sometimes spoke to him, but as we read in D2.3 'Student Council Psychology' these meetings were not that frequent. Because a lot has to be done for the career day (this year: 3 lectures, 3 workshops and 10 companies) it is useful to organize this day together. When working together you really have to be careful that you work efficiently. A further collaboration can be done if it is desired from them, but we would not recommend forcing it.

2. Internal Contacts

2.1. Graduate School In our Policy plan, we mentioned how we appreciate our professional relationship with the Graduate School (GS). We described how we receive many privileges from them, such as allowing us to print posters for free through them, sending direct mails to all psychology students, and of course them granting us various subsidies for various events like our conference, the study trip and the FYW. We wanted to maintain this relationship this year, specifically in certain areas: - Transparency towards the GS: because we are so grateful for the subsidies the GS grants us, we wanted to be transparent in applying for these. We think this goal was achieved, as we carefully elaborated on each subsidy apply and afterwards evaluated on these, by showing budget results.

- Not abusing Repro privileges: as mentioned we are allowed to print for free through the GS. We do not want to abuse this privilege, and therefore decided to keep printing costs at Repro as low as possible. We achieved this by only printing small posters, and only doing so if we knew we could use the posters long enough (if we were too late and the posters could not be used for more than a week, we would not have them printed). We would finance bigger posters ourselves. Next to this, we would not print flyers at Repro as we considered these to be quite wasteful, so these items were also financed with VSPA-budget instead of asking the GS to pay for these. These are some examples that show how we were careful not to abuse our privileges over at Repro. - Maintaining bonds with GS staff: like previous years we hosted a lunch with the staff of the GS, which we considered a success (for more information, see F.5.5.7, UvA lunch). We also wanted to maintain a good relationship by continuing organizing the monthly FABs in cooperation with staff members of the GS. This did indeed happen and we think this cooperation was always pleasant.

Another thing worth mentioning here is what was mentioned earlier at D.1.1 Youtopia/New Partners, regarding booking rooms for external exam trainings. When the GS expressed they did not condone this, we of course respectfully obeyed and therefore, next year, exam trainings will not be hosted in UvA buildings.

In conclusion, we are happy with the bond between the GS and the VSPA and we hope this will remain in the coming years.

2.2. Faculty Association of Social and Behavioural Sciences This association, the FA-SBS, has been officially existent since its establishment in the academic year of 2013/2014. It was founded to support the interests of all study associations of our faculty. Members of this association are the board members of each association. The board consists of all chairs of the associations. The associations are Pegasus, Comenius, Kwakiutl, Mercurius, SEC, Machiavelli, Sarphati and the VSPA. During this year, there has been a lot of attention for the moving of the board rooms of all other associations than the VSPA. They moved from the ground floor of the C building to the first floor of the B building. By doing this, they switched places with Facility Services. The VSPA choose not to join in this move because of a few reasons. Firstly, we highly appreciate our current location in the G building because we are close to important staff people of the GS of Psychology and to the places where members have their tutorials. Secondly, the main improvements of the other study associations were already present in our room, such as windows for natural daylight and large surface of the room. In our discussion about the move, there were, however, some doubt, because being close to other study associations also has its advantages, such as an easier way to communicate about joint events. Still, our eventual choice was to not move.

Apart from the subject of moving, there were also other important things discussed throughout the year. The unity of a single overarching association helped with subjects such as the new privacy legislation and other things.

Merlijn was also coordinator of the party of the association. This party went quite well as most tickets were sold. Nina was also treasurer of the committee that organised this party. Apart from that, Egbert was also a member of the committee that organised the educative activity of the year. This year it was a conference about internet. This also went quite well.

2.3. Student Council Psychology We wanted to retain active contact with the fractions through the Student Council Psychology (SCP). At the SCP the fractions, the PC, SPS-DIP (UvA department) and the VSPA come together. This meeting is chaired by the ombudsstudent of Psychology. The goal of these meetings is to speak with other student organizations that work within the psychology program.

There were two SCPs this year, which were chaired by ombudsstudent Ayra Gerlach. In this context, it was mainly discussed what a better collaboration could mean for each party. Merlijn and Egbert also pointed out that we wanted to work together more actively. For example, we wanted to collaborate with the fractions in organizing and promoting activities as well as our study rooms. They reacted enthusiastically to this, but then nothing came of it because they stopped contact after the meeting. See A.1.2. Fractions for more information about the collaboration with the fractions.

The SCP is a great chance to speak with the fractions, the PC and the SPS-DIP. Especially to stay updated of what is happening with the other parties. However, it is difficult to make a adherible plan together, because most parties are to busy with their own tasks.

2.4. Faculty Student Council The FSC of our faculty is concerned with issues that play a big role for students throughout the whole faculty. They focus on ameliorating the education, but are also engaged in bigger societal subjects, such as diversity. The FSC also focused on UvA policy regarding, for example, internationalisation and budget cuts.

There were easy ways of communicating with the FSC, because a representative was present at every meeting of the faculty association (see ‘D.2.2 Faculty Association of Social and Behavioral Sciences’). Although there were quite some faculty related collaborations, we did not have many one-on-one collaboration with them. One that was worth mentioning was a meeting which was attended by Merlijn, two representatives of the FSC, priorly mentioned Eveline Zandvliet (see ‘A.1.1 Information Collection’) and Ingmar Visser, the current president of the GS of Psychology. This meeting was the main cause for the meetings between the VSPA and Eveline Zandvliet to excogitate the integration of international and Dutch students next year.

Apart from the meeting described in the above, there were no metionable collaborations with the Faculty Student Council. Although we do not expect this to suddenly change in the future,

we do recommend to keep close ties with them, because this makes it easier for both parties to initiate a cooperation.

2.5. Alumni Association Spectra Alumni Association Spectra was founded in 2014 and its members are all former members of the VSPA, but mostly former board members of the VSPA. This year the main reason of contact with this association was the reunion for former members (see ‘C.3, Former Members Reunion). Other contact was on various policy issues with Spectra’s chair, Rick Smit. He also taught the board and some members of the advisory bodies about the Charter and Standing Regulations of the VSPA. We recommend the future boards to remain in contact with Spectra, because they might be of use for policy matters that require some experience.

2.6. Programme Committee Each programme of the UvA has its own Programme Committee (PC). Both UvA employees and students are part of this committee. The main goal of this committee is to advise about several aspects of the education of the programme.

There has not been very much contact between the PC and the VSPA. However, there were instances in which the PC gave information about developments in the programme. This was mostly done informally, because of both Vincent Schreuder’s (CAC) and Richtsje Kurpershoek’s (SB) membership in the PC. We think it was useful to have connections with people in the PC, because there might have been instances in which we would not have been informed as well as has happened now.

E. Book Sales Policy

1. Book Sales in General

The book sales revenue this year was disappointing. This is most likely due to a few factors. These factors are listed below.

- The Change of Bookseller For the past two years the VSPA collaborated with Athenaeum in regards to the sale of books. Athenaeum is right around the corner of the Roeterseiland Campus and is therefore quite a convenient facility for students to get their study books. Nonetheless, last year the board decided to change from Athenaeum to Studystore, an online bookseller, for several reasons beneficial for both the VSPA and her members. In hindsight, we made too little of an effort to clarify this change to our members. This could have resulted in some of the seniors still expecting Athenaeum to be VSPA’s partner and ordering their books with them. The change was probably also not quite clear with professors, who might have told students to buy their books at Athenaeum. Although the change of bookseller is probably clear to most of the students by now, it is still highly recommended to start promoting the book sales in the summer vacation and continue this high degree of promotion throughout the first semester. So that you can be absolutely sure that all of the students (whether it be freshmen, or seniors) and professors are fully aware of VSPA’s official book-partner. We cannot stress enough that with regards to the book sales - one of the biggest revenues of the VSPA - that there is no such thing as ‘overpromotion’.

- Some Ambiguities in the Transmission of the Function It was not quite clear whether Stijn (the last officer of Sales and Acquisition) or Raz was responsible for both the contact with Studystore and the promotion of book sales, during the summer vacation. This meant that both were not really done until late in the summer vacation. All of this meant that the link to the webshop was shared with students pretty late - at the end of August. By this time some students might have already had ordered their books elsewhere. The biggest lesson learned from all of this is that the summer vacation should definitely not be overlooked, as it is one of the most important times to reach your (new) members and inform them about the best place to get their books. It is important to keep in touch with Studystore regarding the webshop and start promoting the very moment that it goes online.

- Psychology by Gray The year started out in one of the worst ways possible: due to some problems at the publisher the book Psychology by Gray was unavailable for a long time. This is the one book first years are instructed to buy, due to its importance and the fact that it is used throughout the majority of the first semester. Although we did our best to stay in contact with the students, Studystore, the professors and the publisher in regards to this problem, the book was not available until after the freshmen’s first exam. You can probably understand why this was a quite worrisome situation, and although it was neither our fault, or Studystore’s, it still

reflected quite badly on us. This may have led students to buy Psychology (and probably some other study books) somewhere else, where it was still available. Which may have had some effect on the book sales revenue and the overall trust in the VSPA and/or Studystore. These kind of bumps on the road are unavoidable and happen nearly every year. When they do show up it is of great importance to stay in touch with your bookseller, with the students, professors and if necessary even the publishers. This way you can be aware of any changes and keep your members up to date as much as possible.

- A Wrong Estimation of the Amount of Dutch books In our policy plan we estimated a certain book sales revenue using the book sales revenues of the past years in comparison to the revenue that was already earned at that time. In this calculation we underestimated the amount of Dutch study books. Dutch study books do not earn the VSPA a bonus. Thus our first estimation was too optimistic. In our HYR we realized this and changed the expected revenue to a more realistic one. We did come a lot closer to the revenue predicted in our HYR than in our policy plan. A wise lesson learned from this is to start the year with a clear view of the proportion of Dutch study books, compared to English study books. Based on this a way more realistic estimate could be made, than we did at the start of this year.

2. Promotion of Book Sales

In the alinea above we have mentioned some factors that may have influenced the disappointing book sales of our year. This paragraph however may describe the biggest of them all: the promotion.

The lack of promotion is probably best explained by two major factors: We probably underestimated the importance of promoting the VSPA as the best and cheapest place to buy your books. This was especially important due to the change of bookseller from Athenaeum to Study store.

The fact that the book sales is only done online, via a third party takes a lot of responsibility and time out of the hands of an Officer of Sales and Acquisition. Although this is a major benefit, it can also be a sneaky pitfall. Because Raz did not have a lot of involvement in the direct sales of the books, he did not invest as much time and energy into the promotion of them - especially in the first semester - as might have been necessary. Some flyers and a banner might have helped out a lot. Because not only would it remind students visiting the VSPA room of the book sales, but also it would be a constant reminder to the board that they should not slack in the promotion of them. This has been one of the most emphasized points in the transmission of the function of Sales and Acquisition, so that this wisdom will be spread for the years to come.

We did try to offer second hand books in a way of presenting members with cheaper options. The problem with this approach is that the stock of second hand books is as big as the amount of second hand books that are being sold to Studystore. Although we did try to promote the

possibility of selling your books to Studystore, not a lot of students did this. This meant that the stock of second hand Psychology books was very limited, and not really something to promote.

Although we cannot prove how the book sales would have differed if we had put more time and energy into the promotion, we can say in sincerity that we fell short, and that the sales would without a doubt have been better if we had stepped our game up from the start. Hopefully this can be a lesson to everyone who will fill our shoes in the future: Do not ever underestimate the importance of promotion.

F. Financial Policy

1. Introduction

In the financial policy all income and expenses of the VSPA are explained. There were some structural changes to the finances of the association in respect to prior years. For example, this is the first year to collect membership fees by means of direct debit. This and various other financial items are explained below.

2. Distribution Administrative Budget

Just as in previous years, the administrative budget was requested for the VSPA board. This year, there were a few changes compared to last year. For example, (1) each board member could only apply for an individual administrative budget, (2) the administrative budget was not deposited on the VSPA bank account but on the individual bank accounts of the board members and (3) administrative bodies could no longer apply for an administrative budget. This year we were entitled to 71 ‘months’ (each worth €275,-) of administrative budget according to the profiling fund of th UvA. This divided over six board members gave every board member the right to 11,8 months. The profiling fund only paid full months, so five board members were paid for 12 months and the other one was paid for 11 months. This has been settled among the board members though. Since this year the distribution of the administrative budget was no longer included in the annual budget and is also not included in the annual result, because the administrative budget is no longer deposited on the VSPA bank account.

3. Year Result

The year result will be sent along in an Excel File.

4. Explanation Income

4.1. Memberships

4.1.1. Full Memberships Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- From this year, we only have yearly memberships. This is why this year we budgeted and resulted €0,- for this item.

4.1.2. Yearly Memberships Annual Budget '17/'18: €5.504,64 Working Budget '17/'18: €5.352,95 Result '17/'18: €5.499,35 This year we received €5.499,35 for the yearly memberships. A membership costs €15,- each year. The transaction costs are €0,36 and always a little bit changing in €0,01. The VSPA

paid for the transaction costs so we get €14,64 for each membership. Because of the changing transaction costs there is not a whole amount of memberships. If we do make it a whole amount, there are 376 yearly memberships sold this year. Of which 308 memberships for first year students of the study year ‘17/’18, 60 students who where already a member of the VSPA but had to extent their membership and 8 students who already bought a membership for the study year ‘18/’19. In our Policy Plan, we also assumed to sell 376 memberships but we adjusted this to 366 at the HYR, which turned out not to be necessary because it was a really good prediction.

4.2. Interest Rate Annual Budget '17/'18: €70,- Working Budget '17/'18: €70,- Result '17/'18: €102,- This amount is accrued during a calendar year and is only released at the end of the year. However, you can see how much interest has been accumulated up to a certain date. In the period from 1 August 2017 to 31 December 2017, the first five months, an interest of €69,30 was credited. Then we looked at how much interest has been built up to 1 August 2018. This involved an amount of €32,70. So there is €102,- realized.

4.3. Sale Study Material

4.3.1. Book Sales Annual Budget '17/'18: €8.500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €7.705,99 Result '17/'18: €6.610,25 In the first semester the total revenue of the book sales was €4.629,77. Due to the fact that most of the book sales revenue is earned in the first semester we had to adjust our expected revenue of €8500,- using the same proportions we used in our policy plan (58,1% of the revenue earned in the first semester and 41,9% in the second, compared to 62,2% earned in the first semester and 37,8% in the second semester). Using this calculation our working budget was set on €7705,99, which meant that we expected a revenue of €3076,22 in the second semester. Frankly, we were wrong. In the second semester the revenue we received for the sales of books was €1980,48, a little over half of the amount we actually budgeted. In mathematical conclusion: 70% of the total revenue was earned in the first semester, 30% in the second. This is a huge difference, especially compared to the percentages we used to calculate our budgets, which might explain the differences between our initial budget, our working budget and the actual result. Again, it is hard to explain how this came to be. The main reason could be that the students that we missed out on in the first semester already got all their books for the whole year somewhere else, or that almost half of the (already disappointing) proportion of students that bought books in the first semester decided that they did not need their books. This last possible explanation is in line with the better-than- expected revenue of the sales of summaries in the second semester.

The profit of the book sales this year is probably (one of) the biggest financial disappointments of this year. In ‘E. Book Sales’ we have already explained the factors we

believe played a key role in this. Although these factors in all probability have influenced the book sales quite a bit, we are still left with two major questions: which of the factors has played the biggest role? Are there any other factors, that could explain the fact that this years book revenue was almost half of the revenue realised last year? Maybe we were just unlucky. Maybe the proportions we used for book revenues of the first and second semester were wrong. Maybe last year was an outlier in a time where students are not as motivated their books as much as they used to be, and this is just the start of an ongoing falling trend of book sales. Only time will tell whether we’re talking about a trend, luck, or just a bad year. We do know, however, that next year the revenue will not be this low. This is due to the fact that next year the amount of first-year students will be a lot bigger, and the fact that no more Dutch books will be used in the first year. So even if the proportion of students actually buying first hand books is smaller, the amount of Psychology students will grow, and the book sales will grow too.

To conclude on a slightly positive note; we as a board, can proudly say that ‘17/’18 has officially set foot on book sales rock bottom, in the years to come it will likely not get any worse!

4.3.2. Sales Summaries Annual Budget '17/'18: €2.541,92 Working Budget '17/'18: €1.194,84 Result '17/'18: €1.400,24 This year we sold Youpies!, summaries produced by Youtopia, to both the first year and the second years students (only the mandatory subjects). Per sold summary we received a certain bonus from Youtopia.

There have been quite some complications with the delivery and the sales of the summaries (you can read D 1.1.1 The partnership of this Year for more information). These complications are apparent if you compare the Annual Budget (which was based on last year’s sales numbers) with our actual Result (which, obviously is based on the sales of this year). At the HYR we decided to reduce the budget, by almost half, from €2.541,92 to €1.194,84. In our HYR we also predicted a rising of the sales numbers due to three factors: the fact that delivery dates and prices for the second semester were already fixed, earlier delivery of the summaries by using the exam training booklets, and an elaborate promotion schedule on our behalf. We predicted this because it would mean that the summaries would be on time and that we could start promoting them as soon as they were actually in - in the first semester we sometimes promoted the summaries to arrive at a certain time, only to find out that they would arrive (a few) days later. This prediction has proven to be true, as we have earned a bigger revenue than we expected at our HYR.

4.4. Grants

4.4.1 First-year Weekend Annual Budget '17/'18: €6.000,- Working Budget '17/'18: €5.191,29 Result '17/'18: €5.191,29

This year the GS subsidized us €6.000,- for the FYW. The FCC tried their best to utilize this subsidy (which was quite a bit lower than the subsidy last year) as much as possible, in the end €5.191,29 of the subsidized money was used. For a more detailed description of this cost item, we would like to refer you to the expenses section: F.5.6.4 First-year Weekend.

4.5. Received Reservations

4.5.1. Reservation Training, Support and Advice Annual Budget '17/'18: €120,- Working Budget '17/'18: €120,- Result '17/'18: €120,- The board of 2016/2017 provided us with an amount of €120,- to attend the GSAA board day. This amount has been used for this purpose.

4.5.2. Reservations Board 2016-2017 Annual Budget '17/'18: €4.864,91 Working Budget '17/'18: €4.864,91 Result '17/'18: €4.864,91 The board of 2016/2017 provided us with an amount of €4.864,91, because we would lose income from the memberships due to the direct debit this year. This was a fixed amount and therefore has not changed. For more information you can read the Annual Report of ‘16/’17.

4.6. Sponsorships

F.4.6.1 Youtopia Exam Trainings Annual Budget '17/'18: €3.900,- Working Budget '17/'18: €3.261,- Result '17/'18: €2.834 This year we received a fixed bonus per student that signed up to A Youtopia exam training via the VSPA. We have facilitated students from the first, the second and the third year with exam trainings by promoting Youtopia, where they could enjoy a discount if they used the VSPA referral code. In the first semester we earned a bonus of €1707, and in the second semester a total of €927. We also received €200,- for the infamous VSPA x Youtopia Borrel, which was the first borrel after the FYW and is also used to promote Youtopia and their exam trainings. With this money, and some of our own budget, the first 100+ beers were free! At the HYR we already predicted that we would sell less trainings in the second semester; by looking at the revenues earned in the years before and due to the fact that there would not be as much second year exam trainings, beause WSR-t, one of the toughest mandatory second year courses, is done after the first semester. However, this amount turned out to be even lower than expected. We do not really know how this got to be. We kept up with the promotion schedule that Youtopia provided us with and tried our best to promote the exam trainings. It might be that these promotion schedules were not intense enough, or maybe because our summaries were released more consistently. The total revenue this year is therefore: €1.707 + €927 + €200 = €2.834.

F 4.6.2 Acquisition revenue Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.500,-

Working Budget '17/'18: €1.200,- Result '17/'18: €1624,65

This year we reached the highest acquisition revenue the VSPA has seen in her recent years (maybe ever). 22 Companies/individuals have contributed to the VSPA, either in exchange for promotion on our website, our vacancies, our Facebookpage, or in another way. To guarantee the privacy of these companies we will not share their names. For an oversight of the different services we provided in the first and second semester, and the total amount we received for those services, you can have a look at the table at the bottom of this paragraph.

At the end of the first semester we resulted €595,- earned by acquisition (although some payments still needed to be made, so we estimated the total acquisition revenue to be €790,-). We expected the revenue that would be earned in the second semester to be lower than the revenue of the first semester, due to the fact that we thought that companies had more interest in the first few months of university. At that time most students are settling and getting used to the life of a student. Therefore they are probably easier to reach and attract than later on in the year, when they have figured out their lives somewhat more. Because of this we changed our working budget from €1500,- to €1200,-. If you look at our year-result you can probably conclude that our hypothesis has been proven wrong.

In the second semester we did in fact not earn less than in the first semester; almost €40,- more to be more precise. If you take a look at the table below you can see where this difference comes from. We will exemplify some of them:

More money was made on promotion on our social channels in the second semester than in the first. This has to do with multiple factors, the biggest being the inclusion of the option to promote a company in our newsletter. This was not an option in the first because our first newsletter was only released at the end of the first semester (early January).

The newsletter proved to be a great promotion option; the fact that it is sent to over 2000 students is something that a lot of companies were quite interested in. This opened up some new promotion options and combination packages. Most of the companies that were interested in the newsletter also wanted to be featured on our Facebook page and our vacancies. Which gave us the opportunity to increase the financial compensation asked.

We made a smaller revenue in regards to vacancies. This is not because we added less vacancies in second semester than in the first one, actually the opposite is true. All of this is explained in more detail in A 2.2 Expansion Vacancies. A short summary: we stopped asking companies to pay us to share vacancies that could be interesting for our members. At the end of the first semester we decided that by doing that, the benefits for students would be bigger than the benefits it would have for us. This decision resulted in less income, but a great increase in the amount of vacancies on our website.

In the second semester we extended a deal that we have had for three years with a company that is featured on our website as our ‘sponsor’.

Last but not least, our very own Officer of Sales & Acquisition made the mistake of paying 20 cents too much for the Gala. Instead of refunding the money, we decided to add it to our acquisition revenue.

Service: Total revenue Total revenue Total revenue '17/'18 Semester 1 Semester 2

Promotion on our €320,- €530,- €850,- Facebookpage/newslett er

Vacancies €380,- €100,- €480,-

Registrations Sport €90,- €0,- €90,- Psychology

Place on our website €0,- €200,- €204,45

Too much money Raz €0,- €0,20 €0,20 accidently paid for the Gala.

Total Revenue €790,- €830,20 €1624,65

This year we decided not to continue the Acquisition committee. Although two years is not enough proof, one could argue that this committee does not play a substantial role in the acquisition revenue of the VSPA. We would not go as far as saying that the committee does not have a use, but this year has somewhat proven that the committee is not a necessity in regards to acquisition.

The acquisition for committees was done by the committees themselves. Besides a chair, a treasurer and a promoprince(ss), every committee had an Acquisi-G. This year Raz sat down with almost every Acquisi-G to support them with contacting companies and acquiring goodies/money for the event the committee was organizing. Although none of the committees received sponsorships in financial form, a lot of the events provided the participants with goodiebags filled with some nice goodies.

4.6.3. Friday Afternoon Borrel Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €2.280,80 Working Budget '17/'18: €1.307,75 Result '17/'18: €1.221,85

This year we budgeted at total of €2280,80. We estimated this amount by multiplying the average profit that was made last year (€285,03) by the amount of FABs we were planning on

organising. At our HYR we realised that this estimate was too high, after five FABs we made an average profit of €155,13 per borrel. This is probably best explained by some factors: - The fact that the first few FABs were not promoted well, to both students and staff. As soon as we started publishing the Facebook events earlier and when Raz started emailing tutorial group teachers, who were teaching classes on the fridays of FABs, asking them if they could at least mention it to the students, we saw the amount of people that showed up rising. - The timing of the FABs was pretty unfortunate. Some of the FABs took place just before exam weeks, some took place the day after a VSPA borrel. We could see the effect of this poor timing in the proportions of students/staff that attended the FAB. In the cases of bad timing, mentioned earlier, the FABs were only attended by staff, and not by students. If the FABs were not in exam weeks and not directly after borrels way more students showed up.

Due to the rather disappointing revenue, we decided to adjust our estimate by quite a bit: in our final version of the HYR we changed the initial €2280,80 to a smaller (more realistic) amount of €1307,75. We did this using the averages we had accumulated in the past five FABs, taking in consideration the fact that we had earned more at our outdoor FABs, than the borrels we organized indoors, and that we expected the last few FABs to probably outdoors due to the nice weather that usually comes along with the last months of university.

In the second half of the year it turns out our more recent estimate was a lot closer to reality. Although there was one major problem in the second semester: the seventh FAB was cancelled… We have mentioned the factor of bad timing earlier, but the timing seventh FAB was by far the worst; it was scheduled on the same day as the Roeterseiland Football tournament - which was attended by over 30 VSPA members, including four board members - and there was a specialization information day for the second years. We tried to move it to another week or even a thursday (a so called DoMiBo), but sadly we were told that the UvA board did not deem this possible. Therefore the UvA board decided to let the UvA catering host that borrel, which meant that we were not involved in the organisation or execution, and no revenue was made. This however proved to be the only bump in the road of FABs; as you can see in the table below, the last two FABs were a real success. Both took place outdoors and some real money was made. The total average of the FAB has risen from €155,13 to €185,87 and a total of €1221,85 was earned over the year. The cancelled FAB is probably the only reason we did not reach the estimate we made at the HYR. If there had been eight FABs, like we expected, we would in all probability have exceeded this estimate.

The total money earned per FAB, including the averages.

4.6.4. Sales VSPA Room Electronical Equipment Annual Budget '17/'18: €460,- Working Budget '17/'18: €460,- Result '17/'18: €531,28 During our big cleaning session we realized that we had a lot of electronics that were unnecessary, mostly because the VSPA Room now has PC’s instead of iMacs. We decided to sell those electronics, which still had some worth. We ended up selling four wireless keyboards, three wired keyboards and four wireless mouses on Marktplaats for a total of €460,-. This is the amount resulted in our HYR, and therefore mentioned as the Working Budget. We also decided to sell the study books which we had double (or triple) in the VSPA room. In the second semester we were able to sell three of those via Bol.com for a total of €71,28. The total income for the Sales of Chamber Equipment this year has therefore been €460+ €71,28 = 531,28.

We recommend every future board to take a good look at the stuff they have lying around in the VSPA room and the storage rooms and check whether these items are useful in any way. If not, then it might be wise to either throw them away or sell them. This will help you keep the VSPA Room and the storage rooms somewhat orderly, and maybe earn a small revenue while doing it.

4.6.5. Transaction costs Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €8,05 Because the transaction costs on our website work with a percentage and not a fixed amount, which we have set, we sometimes have a few euro cents "profit" on a transaction and sometimes a few euro cents "loss". This played off against each other gave us € 8.05 extra this year.

5. Explanation Expenses

5.1. Association Costs

5.1.1. General Members Assembly Annual Budget '17/'18: €870,- Working Budget '17/'18: €870,- Result '17/'18: €845,94 For this post we budgeted €870,-, which was for snacks and beer during six GMAs. This was 6 * 25 = €150,- for beer and snacks during the GMA. And 6 * €120,- = €720,- of vouchers for the borrel afterwards. We eventually had seven GMAs. A total of €217,59 was spent on snacks and €628,35 on beer at the borrel afterwards. As a result, the total costs are €217,59 + €628,35 = €845,94.

This year we have lowered the costs for snacks from €30,- to €25,-. However, we still spent more than €30 per GMA, because more people attended them than expected. In addition, we spent less on the borrel afterwards than expected. The cost were only €628,35 / 7 = €89,76 per borrel. We think that not all people at the GMA had time for both five hours in the assembly and the borrel afterwards, so they did not claim their free beers. All together, we advise our successive board to budget more for snacks and budget less for the borrel.

In addition, we did not budget for a tip after the borrel. This might be a good expense, this would cost a small amount per year and still provides better amicality with the café staff.

5.1.2. Accounting system Annual Budget '17/'18: €138,- Working Budget '17/'18: €138,- Result '17/'18: €138,- This year, 12 * 11,50 = €138,- was spent on the accounting system as expected. This is an annual expense and does not differ from both the annual and working budget.

5.1.3. Bank charges Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €496,08 Result '17/'18: €520,15 This year, €520,15 has been resulted on bank charges, of which €161,50 bank charges from the Committees Bank account, €298,65 in the costs of the Current Bank account and €60,- in annual costs of the Credit Card. The annual budget was based upon the costs of last year whereas, at the end 2016, bank charges on the current account went up. This usually happens at the end of the year, because the VSPA has a discount on transaction costs up to a certain amount. This amount was “finished” earlier this year because we made more pin transactions. This is partly due to the FABs at the beginning of the '17/'18 academic year. At the beginning of each calendar year this “discount” starts again, making banking costs low again from February. Because the costs from February were around €25,- per month (approximately €10,40 for the current account and €13,30 for the committee account) the total result amounted to €520,15.

5.1.4. Membership Faculty Association of Social and Behavioural Sciences Annual Budget '17/'18: €50,- Working Budget '17/'18: €50,- Result '17/'18: -€111,50 For both the annual budget and the work budget, we thought we would pay €50,- in this item for FA-SBS membership. However, because both the SBS activity and the SBS party made a profit, €161,50 of this has been returned to the VSPA. As a result, a profit was made on this cost item, which is a negative expense. In total, €161,50 - €50,- = €111,50 is therefore earned. Next year it will probably be just €50,- again.

5.1.5. Supervisory Board and Cash Audit Committee Meetings Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- Unlike last year, we have not budgeted for this. With the working budget, we have long doubted about this but have not added anything. So here is no difference between the three moments. We advise to budget for this item, these meetings are very important and a drink paid by the VSPA makes its a bit more accessible.

5.1.6. Pin machine costs Annual Budget '17/'18: €382,64 Working Budget '17/'18: €362,64 Result '17/'18: €403,31 In our annual budget we budgeted €382,64 for our pin machines. The old pin machine was broken down, so we budgeted €343,64 for a new pin machine. We also wanted to purchase a back-up pin machine. So we budgeted €19,- for an iZettle and €20,- for the possible administrative costs to use of the iZettle.

In addition to the expected €343,64 we also spent €36,30 on the normal pin, these €36,60 being the annual costs that we had not taken into account. The iZettle was €23,37 instead of €19,-. But we did not use the iZettle, so the administrative cost of €20,- did not appear. This brings the costs to 343,64 + 36,30 + 23,37 = €403,31. The most costs are just once, so the successive board only needs to budget for the annual costs of €36,60.

5.1.7. Membership General Student Association Amsterdam Annual Budget '17/'18: €12,50 Working Budget '17/'18: €12,50 Result '17/'18: €12,50 This year, as expected €12.50 was spent on membership for the GSAA. This does not differ from both the annual and working budget.

5.1.8. Membership Establishment of Study Associations Psychology in the Netherlands Annual Budget '17/'18: €150,- Working Budget '17/'18: €150,- Result '17/'18: €19,48 The membership costs of ESAPN can amount to a maximum of €100,-, which is why we budgeted for this. Besides we budgeted for a lunch in case the ESAPN would come to the VSPA for a meeting. However, there was no meeting at our university so the lunch budget

was not used. Also the membership costs were only €19,48. The contribution has been lower than the maximum for several years now, so next board could consider to lower this budget.

5.1.9. Insurances Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.932,25 Working Budget '17/'18: €1.932,25 Result '17/'18: €300,29 The past 10 years, the VSPA had two insurance policies. One for the household effects and one for events. After research by Nina and Egbert, we decided to cancel these two insurance policies, which was also accepted by the GMA. Especially after Peter Wurtz said that the UvA also has insurance for us. In addition, the VSPA currently has a very large equity capital that can currently cover costs as a result of damage. For more information see C.10. Insurances.

The €300,29 of this year are the costs incurred until we stopped the insurance on July 1, 2018. From now on, the insurance item will amount €0,-.

5.1.10. Board day TOA '17/'18 Annual Budget '17/'18: €120,- Working Budget '17/'18: €120,- Result '17/'18: €120,- This year, as expected, 6 * €20,- = €120,- was spent on the GSAA board day. This does not differ from both the annual and working budget. This was a great day. The board had fun together, got to know other boards and also gained knowledge about how to be a good board member.

5.2. Postal Charges Annual Budget '17/'18: €117,- Working Budget '17/'18: €30,42 Result '17/'18: €30,42 As explained in our HYR, we decided to hand over birthday cards in person instead of sending them by mail (see C.1.3, Birthday Cards). Hence, the post for postal charges became unnecessary as we never really need stamps for other purposes. This is why we set the working budget at €30,42, the amount spent on stamps until that moment. As expected we did not have any more postal charges, ending in a result of the same amount.

5.3. Office Costs

5.3.1. VSPA Room food and drinks Annual Budget '17/'18: €200,- Working Budget '17/'18: €200,- Result '17/'18: €152,96 We budgeted €200,- to buy some nice snacks for members visiting the VSPA room every week (€5,- per week). The result is lower than this amount, unfortunately we are to blame for this ourselves. We would tend to forget to buy food and drinks, so the weekly five euros were not always spent. Nearing the end of the year we tried to prevent further damage by making a schedule. This way there we held one board member responsible for buying ‘chamber food’ every week. However, it still proved to be hard to follow this: in the busy last weeks, we

would often put this task on a lower priority than other, bigger tasks. Thus, we ended up with a result of €152,96, with almost fifty euros less spent than budgeted. We should have paid more attention in following budget on this topic. We would recommend next boards to do so, for example by making a schedule earlier in the year.

5.3.2. Household articles Annual Budget '17/'18: €5,- Working Budget '17/'18: €5,- Result '17/'18: €0,- We budgeted €5,- on household articles in case we needed anything to help keep the room clean that was not provided by the UvA. However, this never turned out to be the case. A bit of a waste but this is why we spent €0,- on this post this year. It was nice to have a backup for this, but maybe quite unnecessary. We recommend future boards to make specific plans for buying household articles, and base the budget on that.

5.3.3. Office supplies Annual Budget '17/'18: €100,- Working Budget '17/'18: €225,- Result '17/'18: €229,14 During our HYR we increased the budget for office supplies, because we had discovered some extra items we needed next to ‘ordinary’ office supplies. This concerned (1) a pointer and (2) new high tables for events like the FABs. Eventually we almost perfectly fit the budget with a result of €229,41. Of this, an amount of €58,99 was spent on basic office supplies such as pens, tape, scissors and paper clips (the whole list would be very long and more so, irrelevant). Next to this we bought a pointer for speakers to use during lectures, for €31,50. The high tables (including fancy, red covers) we bought for €134,65. And finally, we needed new batteries for the safe in the room. These cost €4,-. Everything together made €58,99+€31,50+€134,65+€4,-=€229,14.

5.4. Promotion

5.4.1. Promotion Book Sales Annual Budget '17/'18: €100,- Working Budget '17/'18: €42,98 Result '17/'18: €31,34 In an attempt to increase our rather disappointing book sales income we tried promoting it somewhat more. Not only in the form of weekly promotion messages on our Facebook page in the second semester, but also by hosting a small giveaway. Everyone who ordered books for the second semester was automatically entered in this giveaway. In march two winners were randomly picked and were told that they could pick up their prizes (free tickets for the Cirque du SoLit, our second party of the year, a bottle of VSPA wine, a VSPA Dopper and some other goodies) in the VSPA room. The tickets for the party were used but the treasurer could not find the payment in the system, this is why they are not calculated in the realisation. Although they did message us for the free party-tickets they never came to pick up the wine and the Dopper. That’s why we decided to keep the wines as a gift for speakers in our lectures or at the conference, the Doppers were sold later on.

Both of the winners did mention not even being aware of the fact that a giveaway was hosted. This does indicate that the promotion in the form of a giveaway does not really help. Admittedly our promotion of the giveaway might have also been lacking. However, people who want to buy study books do it either way, and the main point of the book sales promotion is to make them aware of the fact that they can (and should) buy their books with the VSPA.

Last year the previous board recommended buying a banner to promote book sales. Although we are too late to actually implement it, we would like to reinforce this recommendation. It would be great for the VSPA to have a general book sales banner, which can be used over the years. This year we were too late to actually realize the poor revenue that was going to be raised with the book sales. We could have used more money to buy promotion material, such as banners and/or flyers to promote the book sales, but we were too late to do so. The total money spent on the promotion of book sales this year has therefore been: €12,36 (party tickets,) + €13,- (wines) + €18,34 (Doppers) = €31,34.

5.4.2. Constitution Borrel Annual Budget '17/'18: €500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €493,80 Result '17/'18: €493,80 For this year's Constitution borrel the following costs were made: €338,- Was spent on an open bar for the visiting associations, the guards and our verger. Besides this we spent €8,50 on developing the pictures that were made that night, serving as nice mementos.

Because this total was significantly less than the amount we budgeted in first instance, and because some associations were not able to reciprocate that night due to the busyness, we decided to host a second borrel in the Common Room in the UvA. For this second borrel we spent €99,- on an open bar, €28,80 on snacks and €19,50 on three VSPA wines as presents for the associations that were not able to reciprocate on our cobo. This borrel was very gezellig and the other boards of the SBS really appreciated the gesture. Should a cobo ever be so busy that some boards (especially from the SBS) are not able to reciprocate, hosting a borrel like this has proven to be a nice way to ‘apologize’ and also be a good way to interact with your brother-associations.

It might be an idea for future boards to budget less for the Constitution Borrel, as €500,- proved to be a bit too much for the actual Borrel. All these totals amount to: Cobo 1: €338,- + €8,50 = €346,50 Cobo 2: €99,- + €28,80 + €19,50 = €147,30 In total: €346,50 + €147,30 = €493,80.

5.4.3. Promotion Board Annual Budget '17/'18: €325,35

Working Budget '17/'18: €325,35 Result '17/'18: €325,35 In the beginning of this study year we, the board, bought t-shirts and blouses (€174,10) and printed our names and functions(€151,25) on to wear during our first activities and during the GMAs. The total cost of this was €151,25 + €174,10 = €325,35.

5.4.4. Promotion VSPA Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €409,06 Result '17/'18: €463,24 This cost item is meant for the purchase of things to promote the VSPA. Over the year we have bought several of those: €247,76 was spent on flyers and stickers for the VSPA Offers, a big banner and roll up banners. The tentafters also belong on this cost item, in total we spent €215,48 on the tentafters. The total costs therefore are: €247,76 + €215,48 = €463,24.

5.4.5. VSPA gadgets Annual Budget '17/'18: €314,14 Working Budget '17/'18: €314,14 Result '17/'18: €314,14 This year we bought 500 notepads with the VSPA logo on the cover and on the pages. We handed these out during several of our events and made sure that there always was a fair amount of them in the VSPA room for people to use if needed. We were very happy to have them laying around and throughout the year we also heard many positive comments from our members. We still have quite some notepads left, so we do recommend to keep on handing them out. The total cost for 500 notepads was: €314,14.

5.4.6. VSPAquiantance Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.350,- Working Budget '17/'18: €1.171,15 Result '17/'18: €1.171,15 This year too the VSPA hosted a dinner for some of the Psychology students that were doing Intreeweek: the VSPAcquaintance. The dinner took place at Poesiat & Kater. A total of €1402,50 was spent on the food for the first-years. The rest of the budget was used to buy prizes for the interactive games that first-years played to get to know the VSPA (€80,56 )and to buy food for the volunteers who helped organize the VSPAcquiantance (€45,09). The Intree Committee - responsible for organizing the Intreeweek - contributed €407 to the VSPAcquaintance. This amount is therefore subtracted from the costs mentioned above. This amount to a total of: €1.452,50 + €80,56 + €45,09 - €407,- = €1.171,15.

5.5. Investments, depreciations and reservations

5.5.1. Reservation Lustrum ‘21 Annual Budget '17/'18: €500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €500,- Result '17/'18: €500, Every five years the VSPA celebrates a lustrum year. For this we keep €500,- aside each year. Untill two years ago this was a higher budget. More information about this can be found in the policy plan of 2016/2017. There have been no changes to the reservation throughout

this year.

5.5.2. Reservation TOA ‘18/’19 Annual Budget '17/'18: €120,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- Until this year, each year, there was a reservation for the new board to attend the GSAA board day. We decided this year to stop this during the HYR. In one of the GMAs this year, it emerged that reservations for coming boards should be done as little as possible. So you do not require a new board to do something with this reservation, but you give them the space to decide this by them self. We found the GSAA board day useful and recommend the new board to participate as well.

5.5.3. Policy weekend Annual Budget '17/'18: €75,- Working Budget '17/'18: €90,- Result '17/'18: €90,- This year we had €75,- budgeted for our policy weekend but with the HYR we found that €15,- p.p. (*6=€90,-) came out better . We have spent more than this amount per person this weekend, but this amount was a good balance between the contribution to the expenses we have made and an acceptable contribution is made by the association. This has been deposited to the board members.

5.5.4. VSPA room Annual Budget '17/'18: €100,- Working Budget '17/'18: €100,- Result '17/'18: €79,04 This year we spent €79,04 on the VSPA room. With this amount we bought Christmas decoration, a clock, a new pot and soil for the plant, stools and a new coffee table. At the beginning of the year we had budgeted €100,- but without a plan. A little less has been spent but we think that €100,- is a good amount to start the year with. . 5.5.5. Emergency Response Officer Courses Annual Budget '17/'18: €513,04 Working Budget '17/'18: €513,05 Result '17/'18: €513,05 We spent €513,05 on two ERO courses and three refreshing courses. Robin accidentally paid €0,01 to much for an invoice, which is why the annual result has been adjusted.

5.5.6. Board transmission Annual Budget '17/'18: €250,- Working Budget '17/'18: €250,- Result '17/'18: €250,- This year we had the board transmission weekend in a family house of Egbert so we did not have to pay for the location. We used the budget for two dinners, lunch and breakfast for the board of '17/'18 and the board of ‘18/’19.

5.5.7. UvA-lunch Annual Budget '17/'18: €160,-

Working Budget '17/'18: €150,- Result '17/'18: €150,- The lunch with the staff of Psychology was very pleasant. We had the lunch with all six board members and seven employees at Cafe Koosje. The bill was slightly lower, so the annual result has been adjusted to €150,-. This was including a tip.

5.5.8. Depreciation expenses website Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €59,05 We thought we did not had any cost this year for the website because the costs were completely bought off in het board year 2016/2017. But we did not know we had to buy the extension of the URL, €29,95, and the extension of the domain name, €29,10. This in total is €59,05.

5.5.9. Hosting costs Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €359,40 Result '17/'18: €359,41 With the new website we also switched host for the website this year. Previously the hosting costs for the website were paid for a few years in advance, only the new host will do this every year. For more information about the new host, we recommend reading the HYR. The costs are €29,95 monthly which makes €359,40 per year. There was a little mistake because we paid €0,01 to much so the total costs are €359,41.

5.5.10. Modification website Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- Because we switched to a new website this year, we had budgeted for adjustments to the website for when needed. We expected that this was necessary, because the website was new and the risk of development errors therefore high. However, the website was not completely finished, so we did not have to pay for the adjustments.

5.5.11. Translation costs Annual Budget '17/'18: €620,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- The psychology study internationalized in 2018/2019 and as a result internationalisation of the association had to take place. The translation of the site, policy documents and transmission documents costed money and the study program was willing to pay for this. With the policy plan we did not assume this and therefore the amount has been adjusted to €0,-. The GS pays for the translation of the site and the policy documents. The transmission documents were translated by the board.

5.5.12. Inventory Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,-

The inventory was completely bought off in the year of 2016/2017 with the balance they had in that year. Because of this we did not have any costs here. We have not put anything on the inventory, which is why we do not have any costs.

5.5.13. Telephone costs Annual Budget '17/'18: €132,- Working Budget '17/'18: €132,60 Result '17/'18: €132,90 The cost for the phone where €132,90, this amount is 12 x €11,- and in addition a separate amount of €0,60 and an amount of €0,30. Additional costs have also been incurred in Tel Aviv, but these are presented in the finances of the Study Trip Committee.

5.6. Thank-you Gifts for (Active) Members

5.6.1. Thank-you gifts Board, SB, and CAC Annual Budget '17/'18: €285,- Working Budget '17/'18: €285,- Result '17/'18: €176,84 It is tradition for the board, SB and CAC to give a present to their successors. The new board also gives a present to their predecessors. We budgeted €15,- per person for this. We, the board of '17/'18 spent €66,65 on our present to the board of 2016/2017, who in turn spent €90,20 on their present to us. The SB spent €19,99 on theirs. Unfortunately, the CAC was not able to give their present to their predecessors. Because of this, and because not everyone needed their full budget for their present, the result is less than budget: €66,65 + €19,99 + €90,20 = €176,84.

5.6.2. Board getaway Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- While forming our year budget there was no room for budget for a getaway with the board. Unfortunately this remained the case during our HYR. This is why we left the budget at €0,- and why the result is also €0,-. We mentioned that we would consider financing this getaway for ourselves, as it is known to give the board a boost of enthusiasm at the end of the year to do something fun together. We did not do this during our year, but we did afterwards: the first week of holiday we all went on vacation together in the Achterhoek. Partly to work on this year report you’re reading right now, partly to enjoy each others company without the stress of the board year. This was a very successful week! Because we do agree that organising a board getaway is healthy and motivating, we would advise future boards to budget some money for this event, if they have enough to spare.

5.6.3. Administrative bodies getaway Annual Budget '17/'18: €210,- Working Budget '17/'18: €210,- Result '17/'18: €208,28 It is tradition for the board to organise a getaway with the advisory bodies of the VSPA: the SB and the CAC. We put quite some work in organising it this year: we set up a scavenger hunt throughout the city, passing by places that were of importance for the VSPA this year

(such as the Sarphatipark in which the participants had to recreate the lasertag event our activities committee organised there, and our standard borrel location de Heeren van Aemstel, where they had to take a shot). We made the event a surprise for the SB, the CAC and for Robin, Egbert and Merlijn (as Raz, Nina and Anna took the organisation upon them). The scavenger hunt ended with a nice barbecue, fully cared for by us to really treat the others. For this getaway, we spent €68,34 on props for and drinks during the scavenger hunt, and €139,94 on the barbecue. This led to a result of €68,34+€139,94=€208,28.

5.6.4. First-year Weekend Annual Budget '17/'18: €6.000,- Working Budget '17/'18: €5.191,29 Result '17/'18: €5.191,29 This year the GS subsidized us €6.000,- for the FYW. The FCC tried their best to utilize this subsidy (which was quite a bit lower than the subsidy last year) as much as possible, in the end €5.191,29 of the subsidized money was used. The difference between these two totals is best explained due to the fact that more coins were sold than expected. Admittedly, the difference this year has been a lot smaller than last year (close to €3000,- of the subsidized money was not used for the FYW of 2016). This is probably due to the agreement made with the GS last year; the subsidy the VSPA would receive would be less, but to compensate the unanticipated expense-percentage on the budget could be less, with the GS promising to cover extra unexpected costs.

For next year the GS has already noted that the total subsidy reserved for all of next years VSPA’s activities (not just the FYW) will be €6.000,-. As a result, this means that the subsidy for next years FYW will be lower than this year. By the time of writing it is still unsure how much the exact subsidy for the FYW will be, and is therefore not clear exactly how much lower the subsidy is going to be.

5.6.5. Weekend Getaway Annual Budget '17/'18: €2.000,- Working Budget '17/'18: €2.100,- Result '17/'18: €1.428,82 At the beginning of our year we budgeted €2.000,- for this weekend, which became €2.100,- after the HYR. The reason for this can be found in our HYR. For the participant contribution, there were three price categories: (1) Active member and having attended two or more GMAs, (2) active member or having attended two or more GMAs and (3) not active member and having attended less than two GMAs. The result is a lot lower than budgeted. This came because we bought to many groceries, which we could bring back. Also, we expected that a lot more beer bottles would break, so here we have more deposit money back. The result consists of the location, van renting and petrol, pizzas, groceries and the technique. The resulted amount is €1.428,82.

5.6.6. New Year's Gala Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,-

This year we chose to set up a gala committee that received a budget. This can be found under F5.7.9. Gala Committee.

5.6.7. Former Members Reunion Annual Budget '17/'18: €300,- Working Budget '17/'18: €300,- Result '17/'18: €268,82 In total €300,- was budgeted for the reunion, organised by Spectra - the alumni association of the VSPA. 31 people attended the activity; a barbecue in Oosterpark. In total €268,82 was spent on (veggie) burgers, beers, snacks and other drinks.

The difference between the budgeted amount and the result is mostly due to the fact that deposit money was not taken into account into the budget. Therefore less money was spent, and more money remained in the end.

5.6.8. Committee dinners Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.487,50 Working Budget '17/'18: €1.597,50 Result '17/'18: €1.339,37 This year, 25 of the 27 committees have had a committee dinner. The total costs for this were €1.339,37. This amount is €148,13 lower than expected. In our policy plan, we assumed 165 people who were entitled to it. And that 85% of the dinners would go through and would be invoiced by the participating committee members. We had 154 committee members instead of 165, because of this the amount was lower. The 85% estimate is almost exactly correct.

5.6.9. Introduction borrel Annual Budget '17/'18: €300,- Working Budget '17/'18: €298,48 Result '17/'18: €298,48 This borrel was focused on first year students and it was in cooperation with Youtopia; they contributed one third part of the budget. We spent €276,- on free beers and the rest is spent on two bottles of booze for the welcome shots.

5.6.10. Closing Borrel Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €400,- Result '17/'18: €399,- The final borrel took place in cafe Het Huis van Iemand Anders and this was our very last activity. We spent €225,- on a beer offer; if you ordered two beers, you’d pay for one and a half. The other half was sponsored by VSPA. We think this was an acceptable amount; the beer offer was going on until late in the evening. We also took care of snacks such as bitterballen, cheese fingers and nachos worth €135,- as well. We also had VSPAwards this evening and for the six winners we had a VSPA wine bottle, which cost €39,- in total. The annual result comes down to an amount of: €225,- + €135,- + €39,- = €399,-.

5.6.11. Thank-yous for Active Members Annual Budget '17/'18: €750,- Working Budget '17/'18: €750,- Result '17/'18: €748,69

To thank the committee members of this year we continued the tradition of the VSPA Remembrance. This year it consisted of flip-flops and fabric bags that said ‘Liefs ‘17/‘18’ (“Love ‘17/‘18”) on them and also had a the VSPA logo on them. The flip-flops costed €555,09 and the bags were €193,60. This adds up to a total of €555,09 + €193,60 = €748,69.

5.6.12. Committee evening XXL Annual Budget '17/'18: €200,- Working Budget '17/'18: €349,59 Result '17/'18: €324,64 For the Committee evening XXL we expected to spend €200,-. With this budget we wanted to buy drinks, snacks, dinner for the winners and rent the location. All of this costed €575,58 in total. We expected to recoup the difference due to the profit we would make with the drinks. However, there we sold less beer, soft drinks and wine than budgeted, also there where a number of snacks/drinks left that eventually were not returned to the supermarket. Although we went over the budget we wanted to continue doing the winner dinner. For this reason, the annual result has been adjusted to €324,64. The working budget was a little higher because of the deposit money we got back after we had our HYR.

5.6.13. Board Hour Annual Budget '17/'18: €120,- Working Budget '17/'18: €120,- Result '17/'18: €136,21 We budgeted €10,- for each Board Hour, and we had twelve of them planned. Eventually we held eleven. At the last Board Hour, we spent more, resulting in a total of €136,21 spent. The reason we spent a little more was because we had by then realized that we did not spend enough on food and drinks for the VSPA room (see F.5.3.1, ‘Food and drinks’). By buying more snacks and drinks than necessary we thought we could balance these budgets a little. This did not result in a breakeven but the difference is minimal. Furthermore, we do think the amount of €10,- for each Board Hour is enough, but it is advised to think outside of the box considering what to do with the money, because just spending it on snacks every time feels a bit wasteful. For instance, you can buy supplies for a fun activity, or maybe buy a game to play during the Board Hour. There is plenty to do!

5.7. Committees and Administrative Bodies This year, one of our focus points was ‘Career’. We tried to underline this point by spending more money on the committee activities which were related to the study. For example, we spent more money on the Lecture Committee to offer the committee members an opportunity to reach out to more interesting speakers. We found, however, that it is very difficult to improve the quality of study related events, because beforehand you cannot get a guarantee that - for example - a paid speaker is better than a free speaker. When we found out we would probably have less money to spend than we expected based on our policy plan, some study related committees were the most logical option to economize on. You can read about these committees and their resulted budgets below.

5.7.1. Activities Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €300,-

Working Budget '17/'18: €300,- Result '17/'18: €316,63 This year, the Activities Committee organized four events. In December we organized a pub quiz in Cafe de Havelaar, in February we had a movie night ‘VSPA & chill’ in Kapitein Zeppos, in April we went lasertaging in the Sarphatipark and in June we organized a big boat party with silent disco. The resulted amounts were respectively €39,50, €81,97, €112,07 and €83,09. These add up to a result of €316,63.

5.7.2. Acquisition Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- This year we decided that we would not continue the Acquisition Committee. That is why €0,- is budgeted and resulted.

5.7.3. Altruism Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €150,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- While we wrote the policy plan, this committee had the plan to organize an event for volunteers and the organizations they worked for. Unfortunately this plan has not been implemented, which we knew about before concluding the working budget. We adjusted the budget to €0,-.

5.7.4. Borrel Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €350,- Result '17/'18: €341,14 The Borrel Committee organized thirteen borrels this year. The total amount of €341,14 was spent on welcome shots and decorations for every borrel.

5.7.5. Career Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €242,55 Result '17/'18: €230,65 The first event (the networking borrel) of this committee was canceled. That is why there is such a big difference between the annual budget and the working budget. We made a small mistake when we made the working budget. Some snacks were not invoiced, so we had to adjust it a bit. That is why there is a difference between the working budget and the result. We organised this activity together with SPS-DIP. They paid ⅓ of the costs. The GS was willing to contribute some money, but because of too low expenses this was not necessary. We advise to skip a networking borrel in the future because of a lack of enthusiasm from companies. The amount used for the career day, €230,65, was enough.

5.7.6. Conference Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.800,- Working Budget '17/'18: €1.650,- Result '17/'18: €1.557,50

Initially we budgeted €1.800,- for this item. However, at the working budget we had more knowledge about the expenses, so we adjusted it to €1.650,-. The expenses can be divided into the following categories: speakers, location, food / drinks and other costs.

This year, the grant of the AUF was not expected. Because this happened anyway, we suddenly had a very large budget. Because of this we made some additional expenses, such as buying canvas bags with the VSPA logo printed on them. Still, we had a lot of money left. This amount has been returned to AUF and GS.

As a result of these refunds, we received the following amounts from these organisations: AUF (€808,97) and GS (€620,-).

5.7.7. Excursion Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €400,- Working Budget '17/'18: €243,88 Result '17/'18: €244,64 When making the annual budget we wanted to do four excursions. Because of the tardy start- up of the committee, we reduced this to three at HYR. After that, unfortunately, one of those three had to be canceled because of too few registrations. This last cancellation did not have any financial consequences (except for €1,80 administration costs). As a result the VSPA budget for this canceled activity was used in the last activity. The costs incurred are made as follows: the Scientology Church (€105,08), the Dolhuys (€1,80) and VSPArtis (€138,75), which amounts to €244,64. The budget of at least €100,- per excurcion was a good estimate.

5.7.8. Party Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €61,35 The Party Committee organized three big parties and one smaller party this year. At each party the budget was spent on various things such as location, decoration, ticket sales and promotion tools such as flyers and Facebook promotion. The first big party, ‘Pim Pam Party’, took place in the Chicago Social Club. We made a profit as a buffer for the other two parties. After the first big party, the Party Committee did a collaboration with the Borrel Committee, they organized a party in Heeren van Aemstel. The second big party, ‘Cirque Du SoLit’ took place in Club Panama. Unfortunately we made a big loss with this party; the location we chose was too expensive and fewer people attended than we had hoped. For the third big party, ‘USA Houseparty’ we chose the Club Up and we had a great party. Eventually, after three big parties and one smaller party, the Party Committee spent €61,35 more than initially budgeted.

5.7.9. Gala Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €900,- Working Budget '17/'18: €900,- Result '17/'18: €1012,86 The new year’s gala was organized by the Gala Committee in the Badhuistheater. The budget was spent on the location, rent of extra materials, the costs of the caterer, posters, decorations

and DJ equipment. The DJ equipment was an unexpected expenditure and that is why we spent more than €900,-.

5.7.10. Lecture Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €350,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €4,88 At the beginning of the year we wanted to put extra money into this committee so that they could organize very interesting lectures. However, it has appeared that a lot of budget is not necessary for this. Most speakers want to speak for free so in these cases the budget was solely necessary for the thank-you gifts. Also, when a speaker demands payment, a participant's contribution can be requested.

This year, the second lecture yielded €199,50 in participant contribution (circa €2,50 per person) while the costs were only €81.50. Nearly all other costs of this committee have been paid with this profit. In the end, we had to call in €4,88 of the committee budget to cover the costs. The costs per lecture were as follows: lecture 1 (€12,38), lecture 2 (€81,50), lecture 3 (€6,50), lecture 4 (€12,-) and lecture 5 (€92,-). This adds up to €204,38. The smaller amounts were lectures with only a gift instead of a payment.

5.7.11. Hitchhiking Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €750,- Result '17/'18: €757,92 This year, the hitchhike committee has organized the trip to Leipzig. The budget was spent on the hostel, gasoline and parking costs for the car (some people drove a car to pick up the people who were lost or failed to get a lift), the bus trip back and prizes for the hitchhike competition. This year the participant contribution was slightly higher than usual because of the bus trip back; this was the first year in which participants did not hitchhike back to Amsterdam. We increased the working budget to €750,- to reduce the participant fee and to keep the trip attractive. Ultimately, there was a resulted amount of €757,92.

5.7.12. Music Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €200,- Working Budget '17/'18: €200,- Result '17/'18: €174,70 The music committee has organized eight Live Music Nights this year, of which three nights money has been spent. The budget was spent on beer promotions, decorations, renting the rehearsal room for the band and a gift for the owner of cafe Maloe Melo, the place where the Live Music Nights are usually organized. The resulted amount turned out lower than expected because the owner was rather generous in distributing beer, which meant that the VSPA did not have to pay for it.

5.7.13. Family Day Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €300,- Working Budget '17/'18: €350,- Result '17/'18: €385,26

We wanted to spend €300,- on the Parent Day. Due to a lower turnout than budgeted for we made a loss. The order at Cormet for dinner could no longer be reduced, so we had to pay for 100 people, while there were only 60 people. When compiling the working budget, we did not know exactly how much the loss would be, but we made an estimation. Afterwards the costs turned out to be €35,26 higher than this estimation.

The speakers were free, just like Roland Scholtz as ERO. This meant all further costs were for eating and drinking. The amount of €300,- should be enough when the attendance is as expected.

5.7.14. Promotion Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €390,65 Working Budget '17/'18: €340,65 Result '17/'18: €302,50 At the start of the year we budgeted a total of €390,65 for the Promotion Committee to be used to finance promotion items, the selection days for future first years, and some promotion stunts.

As mentioned before the Promotion Committee was absent at most of the matching days, and no promotion stunts were organized this year. Therefore the budget was only used to buy the promotion items; which were card holders you can stick to your phone, with the VSPA logo on them. We ordered a whopping total of 500 of these, many of which are still left. Luckily just the logo is printed on the card holders, no mention of years or anything of the kind. This makes the promotion item a timeless item, that can still be used in the years to come. The total prize of the card holders was: €302,50. This being the only thing bought by the Promotion Committee, the total result of the committee is the same: €302,50.

5.7.15. Simmer Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €480,- Working Budget '17/'18: €480,- Result '17/'18: €398,80 According to planning there would be six GMAs throughout the year. However, due to busy agendas we planned in an extra, seventh GMA in June. Also, there were two times where the Simmer Committee could not make a meal (for explanation, see B.7.2 Simmer Committee). Instead we then ordered pizzas (within simmer committee budget). Still, the budget of €480,- (€80,- for each GMA) was not reached. The reason for this is not entirely clear. Most probably it is due to members not deducting their expenses made for this committee. This is of course a shame, for their own wallet and for the completeness of our year-result. We would recommend reminding members to declare all their expenses, especially for committees that do not require a lot of time and are therefore perhaps more often forgotten.

5.7.16. Editorial Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €0,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- This year, the newsletter was online, so there were no printing costs.

5.7.17. Skiing Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €300,- Working Budget '17/'18: €300,- Result '17/'18: €321,47 The skiing trip was planned in January and we went to Valmeinier. We traveled with travel organization Husk. The budget is spent on mini sleds, disposable cameras, stuff for the organized activities and transaction costs of the credit card. The last expenses were unforeseen and that is why we resulted in a higher amount than expected. In the end we came to a resulted amount of €321,47.

5.7.18. Sports Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €150,- Working Budget '17/'18: € 250,- Result '17/'18: €210,67 The Sports Committee organized three activities this year: Apenkooien (‘jungle gym’), padelling and Fun Forest. Respectively, the following amounts were resulted: €73,-, €53,52 and €84,15. This adds up to €210,67. We increased the working budget to €250,- because we found that sporting activities are generally rather expensive. We still ended up under €250,- afterwards because the invoice of Fun Forest was lower due to absence of a few participants who had already paid.

5.7.19. Application Guidance Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €250,- Working Budget '17/'18: €150,- Result '17/'18: €108,71 The AGC has resulted a total amount of €108,71. The amount was spent on drinks for the AGC members and interested parties for the board during information meetings. Some money was also spent on snacks and beer for the information evening. There’s about €5,- per conversation spent. We reduced the budget to €150,- during the year because we noticed we had fewer interested members than last year.

5.7.20. Application Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €60,- Working Budget '17/'18: €60,- Result '17/'18: €27,55 The budget of the AC was spent on snacks and drinks for the first interviewing round (€8,95), unanticipated printing costs for the first interviewing round (€2,78), necessities, drinks and snacks for the second interviewing round (€7,02) and drinks for during two evaluative conversations with candidates (€3,80 + €5,-). 8,95 + 2,78 + 7,02 + 3,80 + 5 = €27,55.

A lot more was printed throughout the application procedure, but the ones listed above were print jobs of times when the passes with print credit were not in possession. There were also a lot more costs for drinks during evaluative conversations with candidates, but AC members refrained from invoicing these. Probably, they did not find it enough money to take the effort to invoice it. We still think a budget of €60,- is suitable to continue with next year. A plan on how to minimize the amount of separate small invoices might be helpful to get closer to the budget.

5.7.21. Study Trip Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €800,- Working Budget '17/'18: €800,- Result '17/'18: €625,34 The trip to Tel Aviv was a great success. The budget was spent on, transport, the hostel and the activities. The ticket price for participants was €460,-. We planned to pay the entrance of the Dead Sea, but the organization that arranged this for us did not invoice this. That is why we have a lower result.

In this study week in Tel Aviv we visited the university, a lot of museums, the Dead Sea, Jeruzalem and a city called Akko. We had a few guided tours specified for psychology students, had social activities and had a ceramics making workshop. The guided tours were a good addition to the trip. This costed extra money, but it was well spent.

Beside the VSPA contribution and the participations fee we received the following amounts from these organisations: AUF (€2.000,-) and GS (€1.500,-).

5.7.22. Trip Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €779,65 Result '17/'18: €3.015,33 Obviously, this is a very odd resulted amount of money. As mentioned in ‘B.4.9. Trip Committee’, the trip of 2017 was booked for the year of 2018 and this, among other things, led to a result of €3.163,33. This amount is split into a few of expenses. First of all, the amount of €779,65 was the outcome of the balance of the Trip Committee. This is more than the initiate annual budget because new hostels had to be booked; we spent more than the initiate budgeted unanticipated expenses. Secondly, there are two participants who paid their contribution to the trip only after the 1st of February (reference date of the HYR) and so an additional amount of €148,- was added. However, the participants paid their debts after the 1st of February, so this did not influence the eventual result. Finally, an amount of €2234,70 is left; this is the amount spent on the booking of hostel Gastama in 2018. This is a credit we have at the hostel and it can be found under 'F.8. Debtors and Creditors'. You will find a credit of €2.234,54 instead of €2234,70, this is due to a tiny mistake of the hostel but we didn’t want to make a hassle about it. For more information about this wrong hostel booking you can look under 'B.4.9. Trip Committee’, in the HYR or on the server under '17/'18 board member Nina Somer. The total expenses of €779,65 and €2234,70 add up to €3.014,35. Lastly, there was a shortage of €0,98, which we could not explain. So we joined it with the rest. This meant that the total result ended up to be €3.015,33.

5.7.23. Workshop Committee Annual Budget '17/'18: €500,- Working Budget '17/'18: €500,- Result '17/'18: €446,14 We budgeted €125,- per workshop. Workshops are expensive and we still wanted to offer four affordable workshops to our members. Due to lack of enthusiasm for the first 'theater' workshop, this workshop was canceled. So unfortunately we only had three workshops. These three workshops were: ‘Human Profiling’, ‘Children’ and ‘Motivation’. When you

subtract the money we received from participant fees, the costs were respectively €116,37, €160,57 and €169,20. These amounts add up to 116,37 + 160,57 + 169,20 = €446,14. We could have offered the last workshop for free to the members. But we asked for an entrance fee because we expected that people would cancel less quickly.

Workshops are often expensive and are not visited by many people, around 15 people. And when there are a lot of people, the interactive aspect quickly declines. So it is an expensive but still fun committee.

6. Unanticipated Expenses

6.1 Unanticipated Expenses Annual Budget Annual Budget '17/'18: €2.413,01 Working Budget '17/'18: €1.021,50 Result '17/'18: €9,- The following expenses were unanticipated and therefore we could not place them below another expense item. The costs for new keys for the safe were €9,-. And new batteries for the safe were €4,- (This is charged under “ Office Supplies”). The total resulted amount for our anticipated expenses is therefore €9,-.

The difference between the working budget and the annual budget is caused by a change in policy concerning the calculation of unanticipated expenses (see ‘C.2.2. General Members Assemblies’ for an extensive explanation). The calculation of the annual budget’s unanticipated expenses was 8% of the total income, whilst the calculation of the working budget’s unanticipated expenses was 4% of the total income. We strongly recommend to also pursue this policy, provided that it is well evaluated upon.

6.2. Unanticipated Expenses Major Activities Annual Budget '17/'18: €1.750,- Working Budget '17/'18: €0,- Result '17/'18: €0,- This item was introduced by us in our policy plan, to provide a way to quickly slide unused money to other items if possible. However, this system did not prove to be the best way to solve the problem, because it was not that easy to switch unused money to other items and the goal to minimize the surplus was not met. Later we came up with a better idea (see ‘Ongoing Policy, 2.3’). That is why there were no expenses that could be gathered under this item; after instituting the new policy on unanticipated expenses (see ‘Ongoing Policy, 2.3’), this item was removed. We advise to not use this expenses item in the future. However, if you are interested in looking into our idea, you can read about it in our policy plan.

7. Equity Capital

Equity Capital: €78.753,30 Estimate of Necessary Minimum of the Equity Capital: €32.600,97 As a result of a decision by the GMA, it is now mandatory to calculate the equity capital of the VSPA at the end of the financial year (July 31, 2018). The equity capital is composed of

the following: the committee account (€1.880,77), the running account (€3.569,85), the savings account (€62.643,22), the safe contents (€2.136,75) and money we are yet to receive from debtors (€10.218,77). The sum of the aforementioned subtracted by the money we still have to pay back to creditors (€1.696,06) equals 1880,77 + 3569,85 + 62643,22 + 2136,75 - 1696,06 = €78.753,30. On a side note, credit and debit have been settle after the closing of the financial year.

Another decision by the GMA was that every board is obliged to calculate a necessary minimum of the equity capital; this is the amount we must have on our accounts given the current financial situation. This can be found in the SR (7.4.2). It was calculated as follows. The calculation of the necessary minimum is an addition of three functions: the transaction function (money that is necessary for making payments), the financing function (money that is necessary in case the fixed assets need to be replaced and the buffering function (money that is necessary in case something goes horribly wrong).

The transaction function is estimated by calculating at what time in the year the total balance of all accounts was the lowest and by subtracting that value from the equity capital. This results in 78753,30 - 69252,33 = €9.500,97.

The financing function is estimated by adding the purchase value of all fixed assets. We calculated that it would be €2.000,- for the camera, €1.100,- for the safe, €500,- for the mascotte costume and €500,- for the couches and table in the VSPA room. In total, this is €4.100,-.

The buffering function is estimated by taking twenty percent of the total revenue. The total revenue is made up of the income on the annual result (€35.000,-) and the income of participant fees, grants and sponsorships (€60.000,-). A small advice to successive boards: be careful to not make mistakes with grants that are also listed under the income on the annual result, such as the GS’s grant for the FYW. As a result, the total revenue is 35000 + 60000 = €95.000,-. Take twenty percent of this to get the buffering function: 95000 * 0,2 = €19.000,-. The addition of the three functions results in the following necessary minimum of the equity capital: 9500,97 + 4100 + 19000 = €32.600,97.

Although the amount mentioned here is correct for this year, we emphasize that each successive year must do a new calculation with the statistics that are related to their financial year. Furthermore, the amount is just an estimate derived from a calculation. Improvements of the calculation are always welcome and we fully encourage new boards to try to come up with a better calculation. Lastly, because it is a calculation, boards should always be aware of the fact that it is not flawless and therefore every use of the equity capital should be well substantiated and also be approved by the GMA.

8. Debtors and Creditors

Debtors: €2.234,54 Creditors: €0,- After the closing of the financial year at July 31, 2018, there were still some transactions that needed to be done. In the meantime, these transactions, both from other parties to the VSPA and from the VSPA to other parties, have all been transferred. At least, all except for the credit we still have at the Gastama Hostel in the city of Lille. More can be read about this issue under ‘B.4.9. Trip Committee’ and under ‘F.5.7.22. Trip Committee’. At the Gastama Hostel we have a credit of €2.234,54, that can be used at any time.

Appendix A: Translation List

A ● Accessibility = Toegankelijkheid ● Activities Committee = Accie ● Administrative bodies getaway = Bestuursorganenuitje ● Administrative Body = Bestuursorgaan ● Administrative budget = Bestuursbudget ● Advisory body = Adviesorgaan ● Alumni Association Spectra = Alumnivereniging Spectra ● Altruism Committee = Altruïscie ● Application Committee (AC) = Sollicitatiecommissie (SC) ● Application Guidance Committee (AGC) = Sollicitatiebegeleidingscommissie (SBC) B ● Board getaway = Bestuursuitje ● Board Hour = BestUurtje ● Borrel Committee = Borrelcie ● Blacklist = Zwarte lijst ● Budget = Begroting C ● Career Committee = Carrièrecie ● Cash Audit Committee (CAC) = Kascommissie (KC) ● Charter = Statuten ● Closing borrel = Eindborrel ● Committee dinner = Commissie-etentje ● Conference Committee = Congrescie D ● Direct debit = Automatisch incasso ● Druglist = Drugslijst E ● Editorial Committee = Redaccie ● Equity capital = Eigen vermogen ● Establishment of Study Associations Psychology in the Netherlands (ESAPN) = Stichting Studieverenigingen Psychologie Nederland (SSPN) ● Emergency Response Officer (ERO) = Bedrijfshulpverlener (BHV’er) ● Excursion Committee = Excurcie F ● Faculty Association of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FA-SBS) = Faculteitsvereniging van Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen (Fv-FMG) ● Faculty Student Council = Facultaire Studentenraad (FSR) ● First-year Coordination Committee (FCC) = Eerstejaarscoördinatiecommissie (ECC) ● First-year Weekend (FYW) = Eerstejaarsweekend (EJW) ● Focus point = Speerpunt ● Former Members Reunion = Oud-ledenreünie

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● Fractions = Fracties ● Friday Afternoon Borrel (FAB) = Vrijdagmiddagborrel (Vrijmibo) ● Friday Afternoon Borrel Committee (FAB Committee) = Vrijdagmiddagborrelcommissie (Vrijmibocie) G ● Gala Committee = Galacie ● General Members Assembly (GMA) = Algemene Ledenvergadering (ALV) ● General Members Assembly Committee = Algemene Ledenvergaderingcommissie (ALV-cie) ● General Student Association Amsterdam (GSAA) = Algemene Studentenvereniging Amsterdam (ASVA) ● Graduate School (GS) = Onderwijsinstituut (OwI) H ● Half-year result (HYR) = Halfjaarrealisatie (HJR) ● Hitchhiking Committee = Liftcie ● Household effects = Inboedel I ● Inventory = Inventaris L ● Lecture Committee = Lezingcie M ● Music Committee = Muzicie O ● Ongoing policy = Doorlopend beleid ● Officer of Sales & Acquisition = Commissaris Sales & Acquisitie P ● Party Committee = Feestcie ● Parent Day Committee = Ouderdagcie ● Policy Plan = Beleidsplan ● Programme Committee (PC) = Opleidingscommissie (OC) ● Promotion Committee = Promocie R ● Result = Realisatie S ● Section of Psychology Students of the Dutch Institute of Psychologists (SPS-DIP) = Sectie Psychologiestudenten van het Nederlands Instituut van Psychologen (SPS-NIP) ● Simmer Committee = Pruttelcie ● Skiing Committee = Skicie ● Social Committee Affairs Officer (Social CAO) = Commissaris Sociale Zaken ● Sports Committee = Sportcie ● Standing Regulations (SR) = Huishoudelijk Reglement (HR) ● Student Council Psychology (SCP) = Studentenoverleg Psychologie (STOP) ● Study Related Committee Affairs Officer (Study Related CAO) = Commissaris Studiegerelateerde Zaken

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● Study Trip Committee = Studiereiscie ● Supervisory Board (SB) = Raad van Toezicht (RvT) T ● Transmission = Overdracht ● Trip Committee = Tripcie U ● Unanticipated expenses = Onvoorziene kosten V ● Verger = Pedel ● VSPA Offers = VSPAanbiedingen ● VSPAcquaintance = VSPAanvang ● VSPA Remembrance = VSPAandenken W ● Weekend Getaway = Weekendje Weg ● Workshop Committee = Workshopcie

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