To be honest, university took me a bit longer than my parents had anticipated. I did many things ‘on the side’ that were quite remote from what was in the curriculum. Upgrading the bits and bobs in my PC myself, to stretch it’s life and save cost is not too exotic though for a student. Fiddling with guitar amps to find the perfect tone isn’t either, just by itself. Fixing an driving the simplest car in the world with wire and duct tape, a year ahead of having a license, narrows it down only just a bit. But put them together, and throw in a sports or two, and one has the perfect recipe for procrastination….or….university life.
I did finish though! With some pride, a significant debt, and a sense of guilt having had to lean on my parents for longer than intended, I finally got a degree in aerospace engineering.
One-and-a-half years into working life I applied (and got) a job as a Project Manager, working for a small & nimble company. In reality, the project was managing me, or my time, as PM in a small company typically stands for “jack of all trades”. About 9 months into the job I was by my lonesome in Switzerland, installing a Motion System for a truck simulator and doing SATs with the customer.
The motion system for which I had managed the timely hardware and software design by colleagues, for which I had ordered the parts between some 30 suppliers, for which I had assembled and tested the mechanical actuators together with the 1 production resource we had at the time, for which I had taken care of logistics, for which I spent late nights troubleshooting at the customer swapping PC components, for which etc etc… The best ‘on the job training’ one could ever get.
Just before dozing off on the return flight I had an epiphany: Whatever I had accomplished in those 9 months I had only in part been able to do because of university, much more so due to the ‘on the side stuff’! It all came together perfectly, as if it was meant to be. My guilt washed away, I oozed into a blissful coma, my debt stayed.
Not too long ago I had another epiphany, or, life had me surf another wave. Bear with me for just a bit longer.
About three years ago, after about a year of helping out Paul with this US flywheel start-up company he asked me to come onboard for real and co-found the NL based QuinteQ Energy. QuinteQ owns the wordwide license to a Boeing develop revolutionary energy storage solution: A system without wear, spinning in vacuum, magnetically levitated using high-temperature-super-conductive crystals, unreal low round trip losses, virtually unlimited cycles. The stuff engineering dreams (and PMs nightmares) are made of.… (check in for a reality download the next episode)
Meanwhile I have been starting to realize that we are living at a crossroads, or so I believe: We are with (too?) many people on a small planet. This provides us with challenges like pandemics, scarcity of materials, lack of clean water, sustainable food production, global warming, and the (derivative) need for transition to sustainable energy sources & management.
It starts to dawns on me that the budding family for which I want to provide in the here and now, may be affected in their future life severely by the limits to growth we are jointly running up against now.
I want to do something to prevent that, and somehow find myself in a position where I can contribute to part of the solution. Like it was meant to be…..
