On May 19^th, the Dutch Polar Symposium took finally place at the Museum Museon in The Hague (https://www.nwo.nl/en/meetings/polar-symposium). This year’s event was a full Polar Day of activities, co-organised by the NWO Netherlands Polar Programme, the association for early career polar scientists (APECS-NL) and the Dutch Arctic Circle (DAC).

It has been an exciting challenge to organise this symposium as a physical meeting, after so many online meetings! Due to COVID-19 restrictions it was postponed twice, but it could finally be organized as in person event with online livestream. The program was very broad including art, science and politics, and also a cultural side event at Omniversum organized by Antarktikos and APECS-NL.

For APECS NL this has been a great chance to present the new board, which consist in Deborah Bozzato, Christian de Kleijn and Silja Zimmermann, and greet the old one (Rúna Magnússon and Esther Kokmeijer). The 5 members have worked together during the past 9 months. This event has also been a great platform to meet new, old and aspirant APECS-NL members. We hope this is just the beginning of many more APECS related events in The Netherlands.

In case you are not yet part of APECS, but would like to become a member check our members page: https://apecsnetherlands.com/members-2/. APECS membership is free. Sign up will only take a few minutes. All members will be automatically added to the APECS mailing list that we will be using for announcements and newsletter distribution.

Deborah Bozzato, in behalf of APECS NL.