Still the Joie, how and why !

Intended to welcome the 2025 class, especially the EIX, and to thank the dedication of those from the 2024 and 2025 classes who hosted last June’s admissible candidates, the explosion of Joie on the Platâl announced in issue no. 1546 of the InfoKès was smothered in a blast-proof containment box whose workings deserve to be described by the pen of Alex Amestoy:

• the Kès and the student clubs involved wanted to offer Joys, virtual tokens funded by MerciX;
• sending Joys to their recipients would trigger an email to their polytechnique.edu address;
• but, to rule out any abuse, the administration required the prior consent of the people concerned;
• each one of these people would therefore had to beg to be sent an Hello and Thank you.

A guaranteed killjoy.

So that the letter of the rule would not kill the spirit of the operation, MerciX modified the Pour la Joie platform, which handles the free transmission of these tokens of goodwill and the confidential archiving of the memories left by each sending. It no longer uses email before the recipient has given consent.

The WEI club has therefore sent, for real this time, a welcome Joie to the students of the 2025 class.
To receive it, simply go to pourlajoie.org and sign up on the platform; it is this act that will count as consent according to the rules.

Be careful: before clicking “OUI”, you must enter your first and last name. For the Pierre Duponts of this world, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. After all, they got into Polytechnique.
But if your name is François-René de Chateaubriand, you must put the nobiliary particle at the start of your last name. Without this convention, your Joie will wait beyond the grave.

You must also provide an email address. It will remain confidential with respect to third parties and is used by the system only to identify which “porteJoie” to open. It can be changed at any time and need not be the address assigned by the École, which will in any case have to be updated when you graduate.

Once your OUI has been duly received, the platform has to guard against duplicates. There are hundreds of Pierre Duponts around the world, and all of them are entitled to la Joie. That is the role of the suffix: to tell them apart. And, democratically, all students of the 2025 class must declare the suffix x25. Students of other classes will do the same, which gives us a hundred years to come up with something better.

If all goes well, the platform will recognize the entry
firstname.lastname.suffix.
To keep things simple, it automatically flattens all special characters. If he were in the 2025 class, our example would thus be known by the internal address
“francois-rene.de-chateaubriand.x25”.
All that remains is to protect it with a password, tick the usual boxes and click “Sign up”.

Victory! Your Joy is there. It’s up to you to accept it. Click “Receive”, then "the green tick". It is now available for you to give in turn, to say Thank you, Well done or Hello. The messages and images you receive will stay in your album of good memories, the archives "proposées" and "reçues".
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And what about the EIX in all this?
Reader, I am writing to you here on behalf of the Pour la Joie association, which developed the platform, of the MerciX group, which funded the Jooies of the WEI club, and in my own name.

Reading the latest issue of the InfoKès, the least one can say is that the EIX are not exactly swimming in joy. I understand some of their difficulties in fitting in, having myself spent three years at an American university after graduating from the École. Granted, that was more than fifty years ago and times have changed, but it is an experience that leaves its mark. Being a foreigner means developing a quantum sensitivity: you observe and you disturb, at once outside a strange system and part of how it works. For better and for worse.

As for the worse, the InfoKès opens its pages wide to express it, in the hope that the École’s leadership will change the rules and their interpretation for the better. I have not the slightest shred of influence in that area. But I want to convince you, reader, that you have a more powerful role to play than you think, and that the Joie can help you play it.

Page 12 of the latest issue: “I would like to end with a grateful thought for the students and the few members of the École’s staff who go to great lengths to make life more pleasant for international students.”
That foundation of goodwill is something only you can decide to contribute to, through a gesture, however small. And la Joie is there to give lasting expression to the natural gratitude of those who recognize this gesturet.

One Joy! I can hear you say, “might as well try to empty the X lake with a teaspoon.” And yet.
First, all students of the 2025 class, EOX and EIX alike, received a Joie from the WEI club. That is a real sign of integration. They are all “EUX”: “Élèves Unis de l’X”, the United Students of the X.

Next, the EIX will receive a welcome Joy from the 2024 class’s international Kès officer, in recognition of the fact that they have come from further away. It is not just a matter of miles but also, for non-French speakers, of language. Who would begrudge them a double ration?

Two Joys! Even with a tablespoon, the lake is in no danger of running dry. True, but society has laws that physics knows nothing of. Shopkeepers know this well: to measure the results of their business, they multiply their stock by its turnover rate. The same goes for la Joie.
Realize your power. If you don’t hesitate to say Thank you with la or les Joies you receive, collectively you can multiply the stock tenfold or more over the year!

Page 16 of the latest issue: “it must be understood that certain experiences mean some people no longer want to get involved, and that is precisely the case for a significant share of the EIX I was able to interview.”
I dare you!
The goal of the alumni who founded MerciX is to inject at least a thousand Joies a year onto the Platâl. To that end, we are counting on the new Kès and the new clubs to hand out des Joies to the 2026 class. But what is really needed is to create a club Joie to organize and drive the routine.
Let a volunteer step forward to become the engine of this culture of Thank you that MerciX seeks to promote in the name of Polytechnique solidarity.
More attuned to gestures and positive attitudes that more jaded EOX would not even notice, will an EIX be that first volunteer?

Getting involved in community life means attracting des Joies carrying a Well done. It means speeding up stock turnover. It means going from a tablespoon to a bucket, to a suction pump. It means emptying the lake before the astonished eyes of the new Director General. It will not go unnoticed. It will shift the lines.

One last word: to stay consistent with myself, I did not use AI to write this text in its French original. For, reader, I proclaim it to you: what makes us human is the ability to say thank you without having to think about it.

Philippe Coueignoux
X68, President of Pour la Joie, member of MerciX