Experiences in the Field

I started at Aalto University in 2014. Before that I was studying food industry technology,
but during my military service a friend convinced me to switch. At first, I wasn’t sure
which track to follow, but materials science in the chemistry department caught my
interest.
My first summer job at a steel mill was eye-opening — it made me want to continue in
metallurgy and recycling. Through our student guild and international associations I got
to know EMC and FEMP students, which pushed me to apply. For me, it was a natural
step: I was already focused on metallurgy in my master’s, and the chance to study at
Delft was very appealing.
After graduating in 2019, I joined a small startup working on slag recycling. It was
interesting but too limited for research, so I moved to a family-owned recycling company
as an R&D engineer. Over the past four years, I’ve worked on many projects: e-waste, car
recycling, non-ferrous metals, even wind turbine blades. Now I’m making a change —
from R&D into sales. In a few days, I’m starting my new job as a sales manager at Lux.
It’s quite a shift, but in the end, both are about solving problems.

The balance. On the one hand I was hands-on at sites, running tests and working with
machines. On the other, I was doing research, reading papers, and writing reports. That
mix of practical and theoretical work was the best part.

Sometimes the team was too small and the workload heavy, which left little time for side
projects or innovation. And resources were tight now and then. But overall, the
colleagues were great and the work really rewarding.

Project management and the economic side of projects — budgeting, calculating
returns, following up on resources. That comes up all the time.
One of the best courses in Delft was a recycling project where we had to create a
business case for concrete recycling and pitch it to a board. That’s basically what I do
now: take an idea, put it into numbers, and present it. Funny coincidence: the separation
machine we used in that project turned out to be from a company connected to my later
employer. Years later I was working with exactly that technology we talked about in
university