New Year's message from the Rector
Dear members of the university, dear colleagues and, above all, dear students!
The new year is now a few days old. I hope you have taken the momentum from the turn of the year with you. The campus is slowly filling up, lectures are starting and exams are coming up soon. It is now the year after our 30th anniversary, which we celebrated in one place or another last year. But we have always said that we are looking ahead. And we are now looking ahead to the first weeks and months of 2024.
And a lot is going to happen. We will be able to set up Building 01, our Welcome Center, sometime at the end of the first quarter. And it stands for the fact that we are opening up, continuing the trend we have followed in previous years and welcoming our internationals, but also sending ourselves out into the world. That is the idea behind it. But the new building also embodies the way we want to work differently in 2024. There are a lot of people at the university who will move into this building at some point in the next few months, gain experience of what it's like not to close the door and sit alone at a desk and take this experience back to the university and hopefully serve as a role model elsewhere. We want to work together, together, because only together and together can we overcome the major challenges that lie ahead of us. This applies to campus development. We have decided in the Rectorate, and the Senate will hopefully confirm this in the budget, that we will make 500,000 euros available to continue campus development independently of the funds provided by the Ministry of Finance; storage facilities for bicycles so that you can take them home again in the afternoon after you have arrived in the morning. The energy-efficient refurbishment of the campus, the buildings and our pipelines continues. We will also have to be prepared for construction sites in 2024. But that has a benefit. And at some point it will be over.
On February 1, we will all be looking to Bonn with bated breath and waiting to see what the results of the Excellence Initiative will be. We have submitted three applications and we simply have to get through January somehow because we are curious to see what happens next. These three Excellence Initiatives are just a few examples of many other great research achievements that have been initiated and that we want to continue. And if it doesn't work out, that's no bad thing. The initiatives have enough ideas and momentum to drive other things forward at a different level outside of a Cluster of Excellence.
But a lot will also change in the degree course. We are working on new study programs and we are of course aware that the expectations of students and the generations that may come to us are changing. The formats need to become more diverse. We remain a face-to-face university. The campus has to be attractive, but we can open up, which is a huge advantage for EU GREEN. We have the opportunity to bring our students from the partner institutions, the other eight, live into the seminar and into the lecture hall. Over the next few months, the lecture halls will be equipped in such a way that hybrid teaching will actually succeed. Take part in this. Take advantage of the new hardware and software options we have. We are now very certain that EU GREEN will change the university. In 2023, it was primarily a phase of development. And now things are really taking off. The network has come together. You will feel it.
We have to redefine the target agreements with the state. There will then be money from 2025. Hopefully for five years again, at a reasonable level. But in return we have to make promises. And in the end, these target agreements cannot be kept by the Rectorate. It is a university task. Here, too, we need to work together to define what we can promise the state and the region. We have already tried out some great formats, the internationalization strategy, and we will also establish these for the topics that are also to be agreed.
I would like to invite you to join us on this journey in the coming months.
I wish you health, confidence and fulfillment, both privately and of course here at the university.