One of the booming startups from Malmö is the IT company Neo4J, where I have been working as an intern for the past month. Within ten years, Neo4J has grown to a multinational company with customers like eBay, Walmart and Volvo. Due to the good connections between Neo4J and a research group of my faculty, I was able to start here as an intern with relative ease. This is something that (thankfully) happens more and more frequently, as the TU/e keeps getting better in industry collaboration, which is something we as a university can be quite proud of. In my four weeks here I’ve learned a lot, and was able to apply a lot of knowledge I gained during my Master at TU/e.

The language is the thing that I’m having most trouble adjusting to. Not just Swedish, in which words are pronounced in a strange way (Hylie is pronounced ‘Huuly-eh’), but also the tech-talk used by my co-workers. Even though English is the only language spoken at the office, I still had some difficulties learning all the technical terms. Whereas people at the TU/e fill decorate their sentences with buzzwords such as “Innovation” and “Multi-disciplinary”, people here use “Flaky” (something with an unpredictable result) and “Retro” (a special meeting at the end of each week to reflect on last week’s progress).

Even though Malmö has a striking resemblance to Eindhoven, I do secretly miss the people back home a little. Especially for these people, which love to use some ­buzzwords, I could not resist to leave a small goodbye gift. This is why I invite you to make your next TU/e activity (such as MomenTUm) extra special, by playing a game of TU/e Buzzword Bingo: https://tuebingo.party/. Adjö!