Slouched on the couches in the BeeVee canteen, two Presidents of the Biology association reflect on more than twenty years of association history.

Pieter Colla (PC): ‘Wow! Your own canteen! We didn’t have that in our day!’

Floor Hurkens (FH): ‘You can come here for coffee, and in the breaks we sell grilled sandwiches. We share the canteen with the other Science associations.’

PC: ‘There’s even a bar!’

FH: ‘Yes. We reserve it when we organise a get-together or a movie night.’

PC: ‘When I was President, the Huygens building didn’t exist. We partied in the BeeVee board room in the current Linnaeus building. Or downstairs in the UL, the University Laboratory that was still there in those days. It had those cellar corridors: really spooky!’

FH: ‘Ha ha, they’re still there, under the Huygens. Really spooky indeed!’

PC: ‘How big is BeeVee these days?’

FH: ‘We’ve got around six hundred members. Biology is a big study programme; it attracts over two hundred new students a year.’

PC: ‘Wow, we had something like 80 first-year students.’

FH: ‘Last year, they even introduced a numerus fixus in the Bachelor’s programme, which is now taught in English. We’ve got students from Latvia, the US, Vietnam…
Internationalisation was a big deal for BeeVee this year. We translated our website and our general meeting are in English too.’

‘Cobo? Sounds like fraternity lingo’

PC: ‘In my year as President, I was busy with the Party Committee. We organised parties in the old Doornroosje, and always ran at a loss. Committee members manned the bar and were allowed to drink beer for free. So they just stood there drinking away all our profits! I tried to put an end to all that.’

FH: ‘Nowadays, the Party Committee simply has to make a profit. We have our parties in cafés like Malle Babbe or Sjors & Simmie.’

PC: ‘We once filmed a movie, entitled Sick. About a dangerous virus escaping from the lab. I was cast as the bad guy.’

FH: ‘Sounds great, we’ll have to screen it at an alumni party. We don’t make movies anymore, but we did recently write a new BeeVee song, to sing at the cobo.’

PC: ‘Cobo?’

FH: ‘The constitutieborrel. The get-together to celebrate the appointment of a new board.’

PC: ‘Sounds like fraternity lingo to me. On the board photographs you’re all wearing suits. Is that what Biology students look like these days?’

FH: ‘Luckily not! But board members are expected to look neat when visiting other associations.’

PC: ‘We didn’t have a dress code in my day. (Laughs:) in any case, I never followed any. Things were more informal in those days.’

FH: ‘Except from the board, everyone is free to be themselves. It doesn’t matter how you look or whether you are taking the animal ecology or the molecular medicine specialisation.’

PC: ‘It used to be quite different. Ecologists thought of themselves as the only real biologists and looked down a bit on molecular biologists, who spent all their time in the lab. You also had to be alternative and a vegetarian. I would attend parties in the medical department wearing my black T-shirt and Doc Martens, just to provoke people. They would look at me like: What the hell are you doing here? I thought: At least here I can seduce a rich woman, ha ha. That plan didn’t work out though.’