At the stand of advice and training agency Holland Innovative, the group of new Master’s students, which is made up of pre-Master’s students and a group of Bachelor’s graduates from the Psychology & Technology program, was welcomed by TU/e alumna Simone Bouwmans. Bouwmans, who studied Biomedical Engineering at TU/e, tells the group that she first started to work for Bosch and later for Philips. “Not exactly companies where you would immediately expect a BMT graduate,” she admits unhesitatingly.

In order to illustrate one aspect of her work, Bouwmans uses the example of research on a dysfunctional bicycle light. It turns out that it is a matter of logically ruling out all possible reasons why customers might be dissatisfied with the light. The root cause: some of the rods used to fit the light onto the bike are deformed in the tempering furnace in such a way that the light beam doesn’t shine straight ahead properly. “You can compare it to a kind of Sherlock Holmes detective work,” says Bouwmans, who constantly involves the intro participants in her search. When they are asked who would like to work for this employer in the future, no less than four people raise their fingers.

The intro participants were introduced to Madlogic, a company that describes itself on its website as ‘a young and innovative company specialized in developing mobile tools for communication in order to optimize the efficiency of employees,’ by Michael and Karen. That’s right, the company uses first names only, and Michael perfectly fulfils the criteria of the dresscode for a young and innovative company. A slightly too tight T-shirt around the torso with the words ‘Beware of men in grey suits’ printed on it and matching worn out jeans.

According to Michael, it is of the utmost importance that the clients’ wishes should always be the guiding principle when developing products or services. “For instance, IT professionals come up and design wonderful programs by themselves, but they don’t work for users because they simply are far too complex. Because the customers were never consulted and nothing was submitted to them during the entire process. That’s a shame, because a lot of time and energy has been invested by that time.”

In order to make his point, Michael divides his audience into groups of four and asks them to make the highest possible tower using twenty spaghetti noodles, a piece of rope, and a role of adhesive tape. Finally, the intro participants need to stick a marshmallow on top of the tower. The winner with the highest tower will receive a reward. After tinkering for more than fifteen minutes, everyone realizes that the ‘light’ marshmallow makes the tower top-heavy, causing it to bend. A valuable lesson, says Michael: “Think first, make a plan, conduct interim tests to make sure everything still works, and continue to do so throughout the process. But of course, in this exercise, everyone waits until the last moment to place the marshmallow.”