First of all, wow. The past two weeks we’ve spent in Amsterdam have been such a whirlwind of visits, coursework, and events around the city. During the times we were completing coursework, I felt like the exercises were generally insightful and helpful for my understanding of design thinking. For example, interviewing strangers for the first time in my life was rather intimidating, but as I got the hang of it, it wasn’t so bad, especially since most people in Amsterdam spoke English. In fact, I feel like this sort of exercise is crucial to develop skills for meeting, interacting with, and understanding new people. I ended up learning a lot about different people, their struggles, backgrounds, and their friends.
For me, the most notable site visit was pretty much tied between ASML and the AMS Institute. I enjoyed the AMS Institute because of its diverse range of teams, each with unique approaches to solve various urban issues. I especially liked hearing about one team’s research on septic waste analysis—in fact, I had read that article detailing their research during the height of the COVID pandemic, which gave me something to connect the presentation with. On the other hand, I was enthusiastic about visiting ASML because it’s more concerned with my areas of interest and because it’s such an important part of the chip industry. One guy who worked in computer science and graphics was particularly interesting to me—I’m definitely considering doing something in graphics in my future. He worked with designing models to be used with Hololens to help clean room employees work more efficiently. All in all, there were some very knowledgeable employees there; and of course, we got to teach our own lesson there to some of their employees, a nice learning opportunity for me.
I think I most struggled with keeping up with the amount of activities that were taking place every day. At times, it was overwhelming to be walking around everywhere without many breaks or stops. It’d been rather unusual for me to walk around while in my home city of San Jose, California, just because it’d be quite impractical to do so. So when we got here and started taking public transportation everywhere, it was a little culture shock for me—a good one, but nonetheless it was unfamiliar.
In the last post, I said I’d wanted to learn more about the day-to-day culture, lifestyle, and architecture of the city. I think I’ve certainly learned a lot about those things, like when we visited the Rijksmuseum for its artifacts and rich architecture, floated down the canals while looking at the streets, and visited cafes and parks and windmills and beaches. Of course, one of my favorite parts of the exploration was the site visits, where we were able to see and interact with people from leading centers of innovation around the Netherlands. Not only were the people honest and knowledgeable, but sometimes they’d be working in the same sort of thing that I’d like to do in the future. It feels kind of awesome to see people doing the sort of things that I’m passionate about.
I’ve made a couple of friends here, too—university students, either from the course or from a student association. It’s been such an insightful time exploring the city with someone who lives here, whether it’s an international student who’s been here for a few semesters more than I have, or a Dutch student who’s lived twenty minutes from the university for their entire life. Either way, their food and visit recommendations were definitely worth visiting. It’s also worth mentioning that we passed by cats in the street a couple of times during our stay, which always makes my day.