Name: Orlando Méndez Morales
Place of Birth: Tlaxcala, Mexico
Date of Birth: 17 July, 1977
Studied at TU/e: October 2007 - November 2009, joining the PDEng program in Software Tecnology (OOTI)
Current position: Software analyst for financial services company Experian in Chili

How did you reach your current position?
I started looking for a job already in the final phase of my degree project in 2009. I was offered a job by Sioux Embedded Systems that year, but owing to a slow and inefficient migration process, I couldn’t start until October of 2010. My working relationship with Sioux lasted almost two and a half years. From 2010 to 2013, I’ve worked for different high tech companies (FEI, TomTom, ASML). I went back to Chili in May 2013, and was hired last October eventually. I’m now a software analyst for a financial services company called Experian. So far, I enjoy both what I do and the international working atmosphere.

Why did you go to Chili?
Although we considered staying in the Netherlands, my wife and I realized that would make it very difficult for her to develop professionally. And for me, the pressure of having to make do with just one income for a family of five was too much. A risky single-point-of-failure, to put it in engineering terms. That’s what motivated us to return to Chili, where my wife is from.

Why did you go to TU/e and how do you look back on your time there?
It was the result of the contacts I made at TU Delft, where I did a Master’s in Computer Science between 2002 and 2004. My thesis advisor, Professor Arie van Deursen, happened to know Harold Weffers, the OOTI program manager back then. A four-year PhD program didn’t sound very appealing to me, but I was excited about the two-year OOTI program. In general, it’s been a pleasant and demanding two years. I was already married and had children when I joined OOTI, so the combination of private life and the student/working life required some juggling.

What advice would you give current students?
My advice is that they should never stop pursuing their dreams. The very fact somebody dares to go for a degree in higher education says something about important personals characteristics that go beyond a high IQ. To achieve your goals, you have to sink your teeth into them. Every student is in charge of the course their (professional) life. I trust their TU/e degree will provide the tools that are important in order to become successful, world-class engineers. Today, technological and economical changes are hard to keep track of, so it’s all about seizing opportunities, no matter what part of the planet (and perhaps in a few decades, the universe) they appear.

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