- Student
- 04/04/2019
CursorOnTour@CE&C | Storming the F.O.R.T. with Cursor’s camera
It is the brownest cafe on our increasingly modern campus: F.O.R.T. ‘Pie Debye’. T.S.V. Jan Pieter Minckelers’ bar was founded in 1987 by four Limburgers and one American student. It is therefore not surprising that Brand beer is the go-to beer for them, as the brand is of Limburg origin. Cursor got a tour and coincidentally also enjoyed a pub quiz.
The bar is in a corner of Matrix. In 2000, Japie was given a rectangular section here, with white sleek walls. “Everything you see here has been hammered and painted by Japie members themselves and there is even brickwork. Now where do you still see that?” The brick bar is one of the elements that the F.O.R.T. commission’s chairman Roy Wink is proud of. But the paint on the top of the bar also evokes compliments. “It has been there for nineteen years. That paint was once a graduation project. The top is cleaned every day, often even twice a day, with an all-purpose cleaner.”
Home improvement
During the renovation of Matrix to house TU/e innovation Space, the activities of the F.O.R.T. moved to a room in Helix. “As a tappers guild and F.O.R.T. committee, we demanded that nothing would be changed in our bar area. We were willing to tie ourselves with handcuffs to the railing of the footrest on the bar,” sounding all tough. But that was not necessary. What is necessary, is the removal of the photo of the bar’s name giver, Peter Debye. Since the Nobel Prize winner came into controversy in 2006 - for alleged wrong behavior in World War Two, it should be no longer open and exposed on the wall.
The bar area, where 113 specialty beers are for sale, has the explicit purpose of allowing chemistry students to relax for a moment and, according to Roy, that’s why there are few decorations that are reminiscent of their profession. This changes when a dopamine molecule comes to hang two-dimensionally on a wall. It’s a gift that director of operations Laurent Nelissen has promised them on behalf of the department board, but it is still in the making. "And we’re talking about the happiness hormone here; that can never be - or hang - in anyone’s way."
House rules
F.O.R.T. stands for Faculteit OntmoetingsRuimte Technologie (Department Meeting Room Technology). This student bar, where the employees are welcome as well and do visit, has more ‘house rules’ than a student house. Roy: “You don't have a phone in your hand. Because here you come to talk and look each other in the eye. If you want to read emails you are in the wrong place. And you don’t stand with your back to the bar here either, that’s disrespectful to the tapper. Furthermore, you don’t bring any jackets or bags and you don't get behind the bar.”
Once a year you can take your bike through the F.O.R.T., that is if you have participated in the Japie bike ride. The peloton of study association J.P. Minckelers, coming from Maastricht, enters through the door on the Helix side and the cyclists receive a beer in their hand. Then they cycle out the door on the side of the Gaslab.
Pub quiz
Not yet a tradition, but worth a follow-up, is the quiz that Japie organized together with Van der Waals, the study association of Applied Physics, and where Cursor was allowed to film.
Master student Jorrick van Pol was one of the participants. He explains afterwards why he thought it was successful: “There were five categories and the nice thing about it was that it had interfaces with aspects of both studies. For example, there was the "particle accelerator round" where music was played at an accelerated or delayed rate. A random round called Entropy. A round with right/wrong questions called the MaxWell-MaxNot round. We also had to predict the outcome of videos in the Schrödingers Cat round.” Jorrick also liked the fact that university professor René Janssen was the game host. "He just came to chat with everyone in between the rounds and was a good quizmaster."
This article is part of the special CursorOnTour@CE&C series, with on-site reporting, this time from the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry.
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