Heemstede. That's where Frank Wartenhorst spends most of his time right now. Before Corona, he had a daily train commute to Rijswijk (South Holland), where he works as a PE Examiner at the European Patent Office. He handles patent applications from all over the world in the field of Handling and Processing of containers for beverages and other liquids. For the time being though, like so many other Dutch people, Frank has to work from his home office. “I do go to the office one day a week, to keep in touch with everyone and everything.”
Despite now living on the other side of the Netherlands, Frank has by no means forgotten the University of Twente. He studied there from 1989 to 1995, at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. During the introduction week, he was still looking for somewhere to live. He was given a list of potential rooms on campus and cycled to each of them to ask if a room was available. And so it happened. A period full of beautiful memories of Witbreukseweg 377 followed: practical jokes involving parking bicycles on the roof, snowball fights, campfires, running races such as the Batavierenrace, and so on.
Fairly soon after graduating, Frank moved to Amsterdam to work at Stork and later at his current company. He often see his friends from the UT, nevertheless. A close-knit group, they regularly organize reunions and even revisited the campus a few years ago: “Some renovation work has been done, but the feel of the place hasn't changed a bit.”
Frank occasionally also bumps into a fellow UT graduate. “We obviously then talk about what and how we are each doing now, but also about the time in Twente. For my 50th birthday party, old friends from uni made a photo presentation with numerous old shots from those days at the UT. A truly unforgettable time with friends for life!"