My time at Van Wijnen Arnhem hasn’t been a quite ordinary time. Right from the start there was a set back
because the person who attracted me to come to VWA to conduct the research and write my master’s thesis got
fired in my first week there. Then it also became clear that it was not possible to continue the research as it was planned, but fortunately it was possible for me to stay at VWA. The research plan had to be changed which caused some more delay at the start of the project. All in all not the start I hoped for.
After the somewhat bumpy start, the good conversations with Anton and Peter gave me new energy. A very interesting new research objective was established and I started to conduct the interviews. During the weeks that I conducted these interviews it became clear that, due to some organizational changes and other personal issues, multiple employees stopped working at VWA or wouldn’t be available for a longer period of time. These
were not only employees that worked for VWA just recently but also employees that have been working there for multiple years. For me, this was very frustrating because those were the people who could provide me with the most information about how construction projects were conducted at VWA.
Halfway the project, Peter came to visit VWA. I arranged that we could start the day with a construction site visit. The idea of this visit was to walk around at a construction site and in that way to get a nice insight view on how a dwelling is built. However, the executor of VWA at the construction site turned the visit into a small lecture and we never left the shack. Although we both learned from the “lecture” of the executor, it was kind of a
bummer that in the end there was no time left to walk around at the construction site.
As the project continued, also the organisational changes within VWA continued and now also people higher up in the hierarchy left VWA. This caused a lot of restlessness among the employees of VWA and everyone had to work almost twice as hard to get the work done, which made it hard to make appointments with employees to interview them or discuss certain outcomes. A reorganisation of the dwelling construction office initiated by the dwelling department manager caused that, I had to move to another department. This was a pity because this caused that the people who were involved in my research were not around me anymore.
As the end of the project came closer also my second supervisor (Anton) was cleared from his duties at VWA. Fortunately, this was almost at the end of my project and Anton stayed at my disposal for any questions and feedback.
Because of the bumpy period VWA went through and is still going through, it was for me as a graduate intern
hard to gather the required information and feedback of people within VWA. So besides that writing this master’s
thesis is a challenge on itself, it was even more a challenge to do it during the period VWA is currently in. All in all I learned a lot, not just about how to conduct research, but also about how things can go in business life and how to cope with that.
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