Education

A new kind of engineer

,,Back in China, we just had to listen to what the teacher told us,” recalls Chemical Engineering student Jiang Shangfeng (26). ,,It’s the way we’ve been brought up.’

‘ She’s explaining what % apart from the language barrier – holds back some of her fellow Chinese students from participating in the fierce discussions that are so typical of the industrial ecology course. They’ve never before been encouraged to speak their minds. But things are changing rapidly in China, she adds. China has discovered that creative, open-minded people often make the best employees: not the sullen, passive students that the current system tends to breed.

For Jiang Shangfeng, Industrial Ecology was an eye-opener. ,,I’ve learnt to look at problems from many different angles, not just the environmental or the economic one.” They also get acquainted with all the different ‘actors’ and their interests. She laughingly admits that students can get carried away when they have to role-play the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ % identifying with your character comes quite naturally to them.

People like Jiang Shangfeng and her Turkish fellow student Fatma Gunel (27) may become a new wave of engineers who’ll help make sustainability a priority in their home countries. Obviously, the environment is not yet a top priority when there is still a huge economic gap to bridge with the West, but slowly sustainability is becoming more en vogue.

Fatma sees an important difference between her Dutch and Asian classmates: ,,We’re more thorough, they’re more practical. It would be great to combine those two qualities.”

Industrial Ecology really adds something to the chemical engineering programme, says Dutch student Martijn van der Hoeven (24). ,,You learn to design production processes in a more sustainable way. With a tool like Life Cycle Assessment, the students can compare the life cycle of two products and decide which one is more damaging to the environment.” Also important: the students don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes that easily when data are selectively used. Van der Hoeven: ,,If you show the atmospheric CO2-concentration of the last 500,0000 years you get a much less alarming picture than if you only look at the last 100 years.”

,,Back in China, we just had to listen to what the teacher told us,” recalls Chemical Engineering student Jiang Shangfeng (26). ,,It’s the way we’ve been brought up.” She’s explaining what % apart from the language barrier – holds back some of her fellow Chinese students from participating in the fierce discussions that are so typical of the industrial ecology course. They’ve never before been encouraged to speak their minds. But things are changing rapidly in China, she adds. China has discovered that creative, open-minded people often make the best employees: not the sullen, passive students that the current system tends to breed.

For Jiang Shangfeng, Industrial Ecology was an eye-opener. ,,I’ve learnt to look at problems from many different angles, not just the environmental or the economic one.” They also get acquainted with all the different ‘actors’ and their interests. She laughingly admits that students can get carried away when they have to role-play the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ % identifying with your character comes quite naturally to them.

People like Jiang Shangfeng and her Turkish fellow student Fatma Gunel (27) may become a new wave of engineers who’ll help make sustainability a priority in their home countries. Obviously, the environment is not yet a top priority when there is still a huge economic gap to bridge with the West, but slowly sustainability is becoming more en vogue.

Fatma sees an important difference between her Dutch and Asian classmates: ,,We’re more thorough, they’re more practical. It would be great to combine those two qualities.”

Industrial Ecology really adds something to the chemical engineering programme, says Dutch student Martijn van der Hoeven (24). ,,You learn to design production processes in a more sustainable way. With a tool like Life Cycle Assessment, the students can compare the life cycle of two products and decide which one is more damaging to the environment.” Also important: the students don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes that easily when data are selectively used. Van der Hoeven: ,,If you show the atmospheric CO2-concentration of the last 500,0000 years you get a much less alarming picture than if you only look at the last 100 years.”

Editor Redactie

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