Engineering your career

I’m Laurens van Koppenhagen, 21 years old, and in August I completed my first year working at the Arnhem branch of VIRO. I completed a higher professional education course in Mechanical Engineering at HAN University of Applied Sciences in Arnhem. My first work placement while on this course was at Thomassen Machining, which specialises in the mechanical processing of gas turbine housings. My second work placement was at HyET, a company specialising in the development of electrochemical hydrogen compressors.

During the third year of my mechanical engineering studies at HAN University of Applied Sciences in Arnhem, I completed a work placement at VIRO’s Arnhem branch. I chose VIRO because it is an engineering firm that offers a broad range of services and has huge wealth of knowledge and expertise in Product Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Industrial Projects. I became aware of VIRO during the HAN University of Applied Sciences job fair, where they showed a number of projects from their different fields of expertise.

My name is Ivo Morsink, I’m 33 years of age, and I live in Denekamp. As I grew up in the countryside, I quickly became familiar with all kinds of machinery and vehicles. At a relatively early age I bought my first moped, and I often tinkered with it after using it for motorcross. I started to find engineering more and more interesting, so off I went to study Mechanical Engineering at the ROC college in Hengelo. Next, I took the Mechanical Engineering course at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede. After university, I worked for various companies in the food industry, waste recycling and general mechanical engineering.

My name is Peter Beens, TPD Engineer at VIRO’s Groningen branch. I studied Mechanical Engineering at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. I have always been very interested in machines and how they work, as I find it so intriguing to see how a group of components can perform a certain job together. The reason I chose the Mechanical Engineering course was that I wanted to acquire more knowledge and skills, so I’d be able to design the machinery or products that I have always found so fascinating.

I’m Mike Kolkman, and I studied Mechanical Engineering at Saxion University of Applied Sciences. Before starting this course, I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Regional Training Centre in Twente. Thanks to a partnership between these two institutions, I was able to complete both courses in seven years. As part of the ‘Study and career orientation’ component in the first year of my higher education programme, I went to VIRO to meet a work placement student. I was taken on a tour and interviewed the student.