Four criteria. Real evidence. An honest account of where I have grown and where I am still growing.
The ability to convey ideas clearly, adapt to different audiences, and hold a room, whether that room is a congress hall, a client meeting, or a pizza kitchen at midnight.
Communication has always come naturally to me. What this year taught me is that natural talent is not enough on its own. The real skill is adaptation: reading who is in front of you and adjusting how you say something without changing what you mean.
At Fort aan de Klop I managed the entire pizza operation alone on busy evenings: taking orders, ensuring quality, and coordinating a team of kitchen staff mostly aged 15 to 19. The challenge was not the pizza. It was that the communication style that works with an adult colleague does not work with a 16-year-old who has never had a professional job before. I learned to lead with patience, explain the reasoning behind every instruction rather than just giving the instruction, and use humour to break tension quickly. I also noticed something honest: the younger generation today is more turned inward than I expected, and reaching them required more deliberate effort than I was used to.
At the Veranderen voor de Toekomst congress I stepped into a host role in front of professionals from multiple sectors. That required an entirely different register: credibility, pacing, and the ability to hold energy in a room full of people who had not come to be entertained but to work. The congress format itself, breakout workshops rather than passive lectures, meant the communication was live and interactive throughout the day.
My AIQOS presentation brought these threads together in an academic and professional context. I distilled months of thesis research into a presentation for practitioners, which meant translating complexity into clarity without losing the substance.
Looking beyond your own context, sector and culture. Letting different perspectives genuinely change how you think, not just what you know.
My horizon widened this year in three distinct directions, and each one shifted something real in how I see the world.
Internationally, I conducted an interview with a Turkish client during my internship at AIQOS. She gave me a candid account of how their organisation operates: Turkish professional culture tends toward inclusion, bringing as many people as possible into decisions and processes. She acknowledged herself that this preference would work against the proposed solution, as wider inclusion would slow the system and reduce efficiency. That conversation made me think carefully about the gap between what a culture values and what a given technical solution requires, and how change management has to navigate that gap honestly rather than override it.
Across sectors, my recruitment work brought me into contact with people from entirely different worlds in a single working week. The conversation that stuck with me most was with a candidate from Ter Apel. He described how his town used to feel: neighbours leaving their back doors open for anyone to pop in for coffee, a genuine community. That had changed. When I sat with what he told me, I looked at my own kickboxing gear sitting outside my front door and asked myself whether I would leave it there if I lived where he did. I had previously held a straightforward view on the asylum seeker situation in the Netherlands. That conversation complicated it. That is what a broad horizon actually feels like: not comfortable, and not reversible.
Between theory and practice, the sharpest moment came during the Top Management and Political Skill course. We discussed Gelfand et al. (2015) on cross-cultural negotiation: the research shows that the rational, logic-driven communication style that predicts good outcomes in the United States backfires in Egypt, where trust is built through honour, moral integrity and relationship protection rather than the strength of an argument. I had someone to test this with immediately. Mariam, an Egyptian classmate who made sure no lecture was ever boring and who consistently pushed my thinking, became the texture behind the theory. The more we talked, the more I recognised the pattern, not as a stereotype but as a genuine difference in what we each valued in a conversation. The paper gave me a framework. Mariam made it real. It also changed how I approach recruiting conversations: walking in assuming that clarity and logic will always land the same way is a mistake. Sometimes what someone needs is to feel respected before they can hear what you are saying.
Honest self-knowledge: seeing your own patterns clearly, sitting with uncomfortable feedback, and letting what you find actually change something.
Self-reflection is the criterion I take most seriously in this portfolio, partly because I was told I lacked it. Being questioned on my reflective capacity during a job interview was the kind of feedback that either bounces off you or stays with you. It stayed.
My honest response at the time was defensive: I thought the interviewer had not asked the right questions to get to the depth she was looking for. I still think there is something to that. But I also know that waiting to be asked better questions is not the same as being reflective. Reflection means going there without being invited.
What this year surfaced about me: I lead with energy and do not always calibrate it to the room. I want to be liked by the people who get to know me, and that can blur professional clarity. My first instinct when challenged is to defend rather than absorb. I struggle to deliver hard news to people I have come to respect. I had a genuine crisis of confidence about whether this field would stay relevant and I almost made a poor decision because of it. I left a sales job because the values did not align and I could not perform when they did not. These are not flattering observations in every case. But they are true ones.
The evidence throughout this portfolio is the practical demonstration. I have included the rejection story, the AI doubt, the difficulty with saying no, and the things I am still working on. A portfolio that only shows the highlights would not be evidence of self-reflection. It would be evidence of its absence.
Knowing how you learn, not just what you have learned. Adjusting your approach based on that knowledge and using it to get more out of every experience.
I know how I learn best, and that knowledge became practically useful this year in a way it had not before.
I learn by doing and by writing things down. The clearest example was during my OneStream training at AIQOS. The material felt dry and abstract when I was just reading through it. The moment they introduced a test environment where I could actually implement what I had read, something clicked. Interactive and applied beats passive and sequential every time for me. Writing down the things I needed to retain was not a revision strategy. It was the way I thought through them in the first place.
I also learn well through people. One of the most useful hours of this academic year was sitting with Alec the morning of an exam, going through four or five theories I had not fully consolidated. I would not have passed without that session. That is not a confession of poor preparation. It is an honest observation that talking through ideas with someone who has understood them differently accelerates my own understanding faster than any amount of solo studying.
The metacognitive growth I am proudest of this year is in time management. I used to leave work until the pressure of a deadline forced me to act. I do not do that anymore, or significantly less. What changed is not discipline exactly. It is that I understood why I was doing it: leaving things late was a way of managing anxiety about the outcome. Starting earlier means facing the uncertainty sooner. Once I named that pattern, I could work against it. I now start earlier, which means I have time to be thoughtful rather than reactive, and the quality of the output reflects that.