'By understanding materials on a molecular basis, we can design and develop new materials or improve existing materials.'
I chose the specialisation Molecules & Materials Engineering, because I am very interested in how materials are made, what they consist of and how we can tune their properties regarding the application. This Master's gives me the opportunity to understand materials on a molecular basis. With this knowledge, we can design and develop new materials or improve existing materials. I think that it makes us able to work on a better, safer and cleaner world, which is very important for me.
Great atmosphere and a beautiful campus
Before my Master’s in Chemical Engineering, I followed the Bachelor’s in Chemical Science & Engineering at the University of Twente. I decided to study at the University of Twente because of the great atmosphere and the beautiful campus. Everyone is really relaxed, nice and open. Also, the city appealed to me, it is very cosy, but not as big and busy as some other cities. Besides that, the education itself is very good and future possibilities are endless. On top of that, the student-for-a-day – day showed me that the study association gives you a lot of opportunities, fun and help where needed. It creates a kind of family and I immediately felt welcome.
One of the courses I liked the most was Organic Materials Science. In this course, we learned about the enormous variations in the physical properties of organic materials as a result of the different existing molecular structures and about how to affect them. Organic materials and their structure-property relations discussed were among others polymers, liquid crystals, dendrimers, hydrogels and carbon allotropes. I especially liked the cohesion between several courses. We used for example the knowledge obtained in this course and other courses to understand our experiments during the lab course Project Organic Materials.
Study abroad
I did my internship at CSIRO Clayton, which is a big research organisation in Australia. I worked on the embedding of metal-organic framework encapsulated enzymes into a gel. Doing my internship in Australia was a great opportunity to study abroad and get to know the work culture in a different country. You are able to explore what a future job could possibly look like. I really liked my project because it gave me the opportunity to work on a subject that I hadn't worked on before. This made it challenging and gave me a lot of new knowledge. I got to be part of breakthrough research!