Jette loves a nice top

Jette (18) and her roommate are eating fries from a cone and drinking hard seltzer with passionfruit flavour. Especially for the introduction week a bridge has been built between the student corps’ society and a small grassy area across the street. Jette leans back in the shade, her sunglasses in her hair.

She picks a scrap of toilet paper off the sole of her shoe: pink Adidas Gazelles with yellow stripes. She did her best to clean them, but she couldn’t get the brown stains out. During her gap year she worked as a ski instructor in Austria, where the trainers were already her ‘going-out shoes’.

Last week Jette moved all her clothes from Hengelo to her new room in Blijdorp. It takes some adjusting to move from a relatively small town to Rotterdam. “In Hengelo I know the city centre by heart, and here I don’t even know what the city centre really is.” Luckily she immediately gets on with her housemate. This morning her housemate helped Jette pick out her outfit. She has a simple strategy for that: “See it, like it, put it on.”

She needs comfort and wants something that flatters. “It doesn’t make my shoulders look so broad”, she says about her top, “it suits my body shape.” She wears a brown sleeveless top made of pleated fabric that has become even more creased over the course of the day. She also wears long, comfortable jeans that she could wear all night. “Long trousers and a nice top, a bit of a party, it has to be a little fun”, she jokes.

Yesterday Jette and her housemate only got back from a party by student association SSR at 3.30 “We said at 1.00: ‘We’re going home soon.’ But then someone offered us a beer and we thought: You know what, let’s get drunk.” Later she’s going to cycle to Ahoy for the Cantus. There she’ll meet her ‘intro dads’ and her group again. After the Cantus she hopes to be able to get a bus to another student association party.

She notices that she quite resembles the other women on the grass, with her long hair and Meller sunglasses. Most people here are already members of RSC/RVSV, but Jette doesn’t feel the need to belong. She tells her housemate: “It doesn’t matter to me at all if they don’t like me.” She is confident that she will find her friends next year on her own: through her Public Administration studies or at the football club, but in any case in her new house.