Noa from The Netherlands
Personal Information
- Name: Noa Buijsman
- Age: 24 years old
- Land of origin: The Netherlands
- Hobbies: sports, dancing, video- and photographer
My name is Noa Buijsman, I’m a Dutch master student following the Industrial Ecology (IE) programme since the start of 2022, making me officially a third-year student. I am 24 years old and have been living in Delft for 6 years already. In my spare time, I enjoy doing sports such as yoga and climbing, I love to dance (recently picked up salsa!) and I’m also working as a freelancer video- and photographer to challenge the creative part of my brain ?
I finished my bachelor’s degree In Delft in Industrial Design. Besides the fact that I really enjoy the knowledge and skills that it brought me, my main takeaway is that cooperation is crucial to finding solutions to any societal/environmental/technological/ethical problems that we encounter. Building onto this life lesson, I found IE the perfect addition and specialization in which this problem-solving mindset is applied to my passion for sustainability. I find that IE perfectly fills that gap that I encountered in IDE, where I was missing the element of contributing to a more circular and fair society on a macro-scale through policy design and systems thinking.
My first impression of IE matched my expectations super well. Not only did I connect straight-away on a personal level with my fellow students, but I found my need for studying an impactful topic fulfilled fairly quickly through the set courses and the wide variety of electives available. For example, Society’s Metabolism was a course where we, as first-years, are challenged about our views on how society is structured currently and where we see our own role in moving towards a more sustainable way of living. Together with the other courses in that curriculum, I feel it prepared me well for the rest of the master programme and how I want to apply it in my professional life.
When looking around me, I feel that IE has something to offer from all different perspectives on sustainability. Whether you are interested in the technical side (i.e. impact assessments), the social side (i.e. consumer behavior), policy (i.e. transition governance) or anything in-between, al IE’ers carve different path out for themselves in finding their own way of doing impactful work.
At the moment, I am looking forward to starting my thesis soon in which I hope to combine my interest for anthropology, my background in product design and my passion for sustainability. Quite ambitious, but I feel it should be doable! The cool thing about IE is that it offers endless possibilities. As for a career prospective, I would like to work for a design agency or for the government involving co-creation processes. But let’s see what the future brings!