‘This house is a really good place to be’

“I’m studying Civil Engineering, doing a master’s in Geo-Engineering. I didn’t know I wanted to study this before I came to TU Delft. I went to the open days and you could go to three presentations of study programmes. I had one spot open and had never heard of civil engineering so decided to go to that one. I was inspired by it and that’s how I decided on it for my studies.

Before I came to Delft, I had a gap year and I studied in the US at Valparaiso University, which is close to Chicago. It was a very good experience and I learned a lot there about differences in cultures. Now I’m in the first year of my master’s. The field of Geo-Engineering is in between geology and building. It’s about the interaction between structures and soils. For example, it could be building in soils or rock, building tunnels, creating land, building dykes, or looking at the stability of mines. For my thesis, I really want to focus on the structure interaction, either building underground or foundations of big buildings, something like that.

‘As the oldest you have to arrange everything with the landlord’

I’m from Bloemendaal, which is about one hour away from Delft by train. When I started at TU Delft I wanted to move away from home because I wanted to experience living on my own. I live in a house with seven guys. It’s a Virgiel (website in Dutch) house, so it’s connected to the student association. I came to live there in my first year and it’s a really good place to be. Every year one or two of the oldest people leave and then new people move in. I’m currently the oldest resident as of about a week ago. As the oldest you have to arrange everything with the landlord but also kind of help to steer the younger people in the right direction.

It makes it a lot of fun because you see things that are happening with the younger people and you recognise it because you have already experienced that. But sometimes it can also be challenging because the freshmen want to party and you have to write a thesis or work on something important. Sometimes those things are in conflict but overall, you learn to resolve that kind of stuff and live together.

I’m not sure yet what I want to do when I graduate. I plan to spend a lot of time in the coming year talking with companies to see what kind of jobs they have to offer. But I also plan to do an internship next year for six months and I hope that all of this will give me a clearer view of what I want. I would love to work in different countries or maybe even do my internship abroad. One thing that I am pretty sure won’t change is that I will end up working in industry.”

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Heather Montague / Freelance writer