M.Sc. Space and Atmospheric Physics, Space Engineering
Luleå University of Technology

Hi!

My name is Rebecka Svensson and I was born in 1995 outside the beautiful city Gothenburg, in Gråbo. I had a huge interest for music early on and therefore I attended a music school in high school. I still play both guitar and saxophone and I also enjoy singing (but it doesn’t sound as good). When I eventually found my calling I moved to Luleå to study the technical preparatory program and later on I began studying the space engineering program. I had 2.5 years in Luleå followed 1.5 years in Kiruna studying my master in space-and atmospheric physics.

It was an exciting period and even though Kiruna is not the liveliest city at least the surrounding nature is fantastic! After growing tired of the darkness in northern Sweden I moved to Prague during the last semester to continue my studies. Besides studying abroad I was also engaged in different associations during my time at university, I also visited ESA (ESTEC) and participated in a project where we built and designed a 1U CubeSat.

After coming back to Sweden in the spring of 2021 I started writing my master’s thesis. I wrote about exoplanets together with Chalmers University of Technology and Onsala Space Observatory. It was the most exciting project I conducted during my studies not only because of the exciting topic, but also because I had extremely inspiring supervisors and it was very interesting to spend time with them and learn about their work.

After graduating I was not sure which fields I wanted to explore. During my studies I had decided to do a PhD, but I didn’t feel up to it anymore. I had no idea what I wanted to work with, but I knew of the trainee program at GKN because many from my program were trainees. I thought it would be a good start on my career to try out many different things and find out what I liked doing. I knew that the competition would be hard so I spent many hours on perfecting my application. In hindsight I’m happy I did, it was necessary.