STaR THANKS!

Our team sincerely thanks everyone who has supported us thorough a very busy first year (2019). Especially the many WU employees who work tirelessly “behind the scenes” to make things happen. . .  

There is a saying in several Eastern European languages, “The first pancake is always spoiled (or “a lumpy one”),” meaning that one should have patience and not expect the first attempt to be successful. To begin something new is indeed not easy. For our team at STaR, this first year involved learning many new things from scratch, yet looking back, we are happy with what we have accomplished: establishing close collaborations with students, faculty, and staff; organizing scientific and public events; attracting new external audiences; contributing to the university’s internationalization and knowledge-dissemination efforts; and raising (step by step) the SDG awareness on and off our campus. So “the first pancake” has turned out quite okay. We know, however, that this was only possible because of the many people at WU who work hard to enable the new initiatives like ours materialize.

We would thus like to thank everyone who has given us active support and advice during this first year. This, of course, includes the university’s top administration, our faculty member affiliates, student organizations, and individual student volunteers. We would also like to extend a special thanks to Christine Reinprecht and Barbara Gaal for dedicating their time and energy to help us with all kinds of organizing hurdles, as well as to everyone in the Campus Management and, especially, Environmental Management teams for their close collaboration on many occasions. In addition, a big thanks to Michaela Hofer for giving our name visibility; to Karin Siedl, Claudia Andre and Aniko Scheed for assistance with room booking and for tips on how make our events greener; to Marion Neuhold and Stefan Schleifer in the Media Development for their patience with our Typo3 and video-conferencing inquiries; and to Astrid Paulis and Sandra Lichtblau for always being so efficient and good-humored when dealing with the endless paperwork flow. Last but not least, a big teşekkürler/ faleminderit/ dziękuję to Ayfer Kaman, Ilmije Ismaili,and Dorota Szczerba for keeping our office space so pleasant to work at, and for brightening up the difficult early winter mornings with cookies and friendly conversations!

There may be a few names are that missing from the above list, and we apologize for that. Learning about who is in charge of what has been part of the first-year’s process, and it will definitely continue well into the next year.  

We wish everybody at and beyond WU a happy holiday season, and we look forward to a productive 2020!

STaR team