Alfons Bruekers, Managing Director at Electrical Engineering (EE) and Applied Physics (TN) is a cool guy. For months now, twenty so-called digi coaches (trained teaching assistants) have been fluttering from secretaries to other staff members to help them convert heaps and heaps of paperwork into terabytes. Meanwhile, an Emeritus Professor is mapping the cultural heritage of Potentiaal, and classifying the electric souvenirs on all floors, from scientific and educational to no importance (that would be rubbish).

EE and TN are preparing for the move to the new Flux building, and since the departments will have limited square and cubic meters at their disposal, creativity and flexibility is key. Everyone’s decluttering like mad, but Bruekers (who, at his own request, won’t even have his own office in Flux) unashamedly accepts a pile of neatly stacked junk: a souvenir of the construction site of the building that’s now almost finished. He considers himself “the construction priest of Flux. I’m extremely proud of that building. All that fuss about it being too small, and whether or not it should have a supermarket - I couldn’t care less, because the flow to Flux is just really great”.

Nine months ago, when Bruekers started as director at EE, things looked rather different. He remembers a teacher who had marked his office floor with tape to show how much (in this case: how little) square meters he’d have at his disposal in the new building, “in an attempt to stress how ridiculously small and claustrophobic Flux would be. He was just torturing himself”. Still, Bruekers admits there is obviously still some stress and tension: “Some people are still skeptical. But they’re no longer in reverse; most of them are now neutral, or even in a very forward gear”. Study associations Thor and Van der Waals are working together to make the most of the supposed lack of space in Flux.

Hold on. This is all talk, and we’re running a trading business here. We’re in for a treat: a serious craft project made by Stefan van Delft of EE, who wanted to remember Potentiaal.

A green glass disk, that turns out to be an isolator of a transmission tower, is a real eye catcher. With a number of those disks, the voltage is separated from the tower. Green, just like new Flux - it’s unbelievable. And, very out of the box, it’s been used upside down for this project. According to Bruekers, that’s no accident: “It’s now a radio telescope, which symbolizes one of our fields of expertise. In a way, it’s also a metaphor for the external focus of our department, which scores really well in rankings when it comes to industrial collaboration.” Right.

The warning sign from one of the EE laboratories is a symbol for the phase the department is in right now, transitioning from Potentiaal to Flux. “We have a tight schedule, so we’re all electrified, in a way.” Quickly, he adds: “We don’t do life-threatening things, obviously”. The tree trunk is the base of the work of art and counts 58 growth rings, Bruekers concludes dead serious. “A symbol for the 58 years this department has been around.”

Whoever wants to check this final statement is more than welcome to do so at Cursor headquarters, provided you take the souvenir with you in exchange for another beautiful item-with-a-story (e-mail us!). Bruekers kind of hopes that #rememberpotentiaal won’t end up at Electrical, but rather at Physics. “What good is this electro metaphor for the other Flux department?”