Aerobloggen

Drumbeat…

 

The correct answer is Florence!

I’m starting at the Driveline site, outside of Florence, the 9^th of April. I will be part of the Supply Chain department and I have two projects. In the first one, I will implement a software in production, which the operators can use to order material. The other one includes implementation of self-driven tow trains. I’m very excited for the things that will come and it will be very interesting to work within the Driveline division since I believe it will be very different compared to Aerospace.

I had a great time in Trollhättan and I got the opportunity to do so many things that I will never have the chance to do again. I will miss my beloved graduate group and all nice co-workers who have welcomed me with open arms. Let’s hope that the Italians are as nice as everyone here. ☺

I promise to write a blog post from Italy!

Take care!

/Signe

[os-widget path=”/signe90/3-fast-questions” comments=”false”]

Best blog readers,

This will most likely be my second last blog post in Trollhättan and now you are probably wondering where I’m going next but I will not tell you about that yet. So keep visiting the blog 😊

One of the benefits with being a graduate engineer is to meet with managers all over the organization. Personally, this is something I really enjoy and I think the rest of the graduate group agrees with me. You learn a lot about the organization and what each department is working with as well as seeing very different types of personalities. This is something I find very interesting and after reading the book “Surrounded by idiots” (I’m recommending everyone to read it!) it becomes even more clear how different everyone is.

/Signe

Beloved blog readers,

Here is another post about our international experiences. Last week, Philip and I were in Germany to visit GKN Driveline in Lohmar, which is a small town outside of Cologne. The aim of the trip was for me to meet my mentor face to face. As part of IGP, each participant get a mentor and from this year it’s a person placed abroad that will guide you through the program. However, the trip didn’t start as fortunate as we hoped since it was snow chaos in Gothenburg and the airport was closed the whole morning. We arrived three hours later than expected but in Germany the weather showed its best side and it was 13 degrees and sunshine.

During the day we spend at the site, we got to meet a couple of people who told us about their special areas and we got an overview of the work in Lohmar. They don’t have any production at their site and instead they are focusing on research and developing. It was very interesting to visit another GKN-site since there were a lot of differences compared to our site in Trollhättan. In the evening, we had dinner with my mentor and of course we ate schnitzel. It was very nice to get more time with my mentor, to get to know him better as well as discuss some ideas about my next placement.

On our way back to Sweden we were very unlucky since our flight in Copenhagen got cancelled due to technical problems and we got to spend one night there. The next day, the bad luck continued and there were more problems with the plane (important to point out that it was not a problem with our products) and in the end we had to change plane. 17 hours later than expected, we finally arrived in Sweden and even if we had a lot of flight related problems it was still a really nice trip.

Have a nice weekend!

Good afternoon!

Last Friday, Emma, Lisa, Maria and I participated in a debate for girls at Högskolan Väst to discuss about why so few girls apply to educations within engineering. The last couple of years less and less girls have applied to technical educations. The question is why and what can we do to deal with this issue? The participants in the debate were students from secondary school, high school and university together with one headmaster and girls from different companies. This made the discussion very interesting since we had very different perspectives and we believed that the problem starts in early age. The participants had a theory that a lot of young girls have anxiety of performing poorly, which makes them think that they can’t manage an education within engineering since it’s too difficult. We told the other participants about our graduate project, that we will present to 9th grader what an engineer does and we got a lot of positive feedback for this initiative.

Since I am the only women at my department, I think it is important to highlight these kind of questions and engage in this issue. When I was young, I had no connection to engineering through family nor friends. Therefore, it took a long time for me to understand what an engineer actually does. I think it’s important for youngster, especially girls to meet female engineers to get some kind of role model. It is very exciting to be a graduate engineer since these type of tasks are part of my daily work. J

Next week, Philip and I are going to Germany for a study visit but I will tell you more about that in my next blog post!

/Signe

Dear blog readers,

It’s time for my first blog post! My name is Signe and I’m one of the international graduate engineers which means that I will spend my first six months in Trollhättan before I leave for the next adventure within GKN. Please click here if you want to read more about me. I will spend these months at the same department, which is Military commercial. This department is very exciting since it is a lot of politics involved. At the moment, I’m involved in one project about the standard parts in RM12 and the work with the strategic plan. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal more but a lot of the information within the military is confidential. Instead, I will tell you more about this year’s graduate project.

Each year, the new graduates get a mission to conduct a social project. This year, the project is a development from last year’s project, which was to inspire youths in 7th-9th grade to science and engineering. One of the activities within the project is to visit the students in the 9th grade in Trollhättan and Vänersborg and talk about what an engineer works with.

Last week, two school classes from Norway came to visit Trollhättan and to spend their day at Innovatum. The aim with this trip was to collaborate between the two countries to secure the demand of engineers in the future. GKN was invited to talk about its business and therefore Philip and I went there. We presented about GKN, how it is working as an engineer, and how we were thinking when we were in the same age as the students. This visit resulted in a journal article in Ttela and Philip and I got a moment of fame. You can click here to read the article.

Das war alles, see you!

/Signe