Proudly, the TU/e announced that the additional budget from the government allows us to remove the caps on some programs and to increase the caps on others. There is money to hire new staff, also in my area: data science. Unfortunately, as the staff is not hired yet there are only vacancies which are impossible to fill. I’m teaching two of them in parallel to 500 students [1]. I therefore did not have time to write a proper column, but I asked our vacancies to write one. The remainder of this column, with an insightful view on dealing with growth in student numbers, is therefore delivered to you by vacancy V12.3643.

[1] The intention was that our vacancy would teach one of the two classes, but as we all know, vacancies cannot teach courses.