‘So much is up in the air right now’

“I’m from Canada, and I grew up outside of Toronto. When I was 16, a friend of mine went to India for an international high school programme called UWC that I had never heard of before. I ended up applying and got a scholarship to study on the west coast of Canada and I finished high school there. I moved to Vancouver Island and lived on the ocean with 180 students from over 80 countries. It was a crazy experience for me, coming from this small town in Canada, but it was amazing. I met a lot of other international students and for the first time I started considering studying overseas.

After conducting and publishing research on propellor-powered hoverboard mechanics in high school, I knew I wanted to do something with engineering. Just by chance, while talking to a Dutch student at my high school, I heard about TU Delft. I’d never been to the Netherlands before. That’s how I ended up here and I am now starting my third year in Computer Science. I was interested in a lot of different things, but for me Computer Science seemed like a versatile tool that can be used in all of these other fields that I’m interested in.

‘I got an internship in January with Microsoft’

I got an internship in January with Microsoft and I was supposed to move to Ireland for three months. My whole plan was to spend this time in a new country, living and working there and it ended up transitioning to an online internship. I was still lucky because I thought the entire internship would be cancelled due to the pandemic. My job was a Technical Program Manager Intern. Basically, they give you a problem space and you have to come up with new engineering solutions to solve that problem. You work with engineers and marketing and design teams to bring these solutions to life and deploy them. In my case, a lot of people weren’t downloading mobile apps so I created a new recommendation model to help people find the best app for them. You start with this big problem, and then you dive into this deep research phase where you’re looking at data sets and conducting user research in order to brainstorm potential solutions. Then you start putting the pieces together. It was a really cool opportunity.

Now, in the final year of my bachelor’s, I am sort of at a crossroads. It’s very confronting and now is the time to make a lot of decisions, but I’m not 100% sure what I want to do. I considered working full-time next year, but I decided to take a year off to pursue other projects. Then I can decide if I will continue studying or start working or do something else entirely. So much is up in the air right now, but I think life is all about diving into new opportunities and not planning so far in advance. I recently took up rowing and I’m learning Dutch. I find that I organise my time better when there’s a lot to do so I keep trying new things.”

Who are the people who work and study on campus? We meet them in Humans of TU Delft. Want to be featured in this series? Or do you know someone with a good story to tell? Send us an e-mail at humansoftudelft@gmail.com  

Heather Montague / Freelance writer