What feels like play to you but looks like work to others, this is where you should be

Last Friday February 16th in CIC nanoGUNE we had the opportunity to attend an Alumni Career Talk with Patricia Riego Saavedra, a former nanoGUNE predoctoral researcher who is now an industry 4.0 engineer at GHI Smart Furnaces. Patricia did her PhD in 2019 about the "Magneto-optical characterization of magnetic thin films and interface structures" and we have had the chance to know more about her life after this thesis.

Patricia Riego

During the talk, she explained that, when she was about to end her stay at nanoGUNE, she wasn’t sure about what her future would be like. Patricia did not see herself following a standard career path in science or research, but she really liked to program and to analyze data. Eventually, she was hired by GHI Smart Furnaces, a basque industrial company in which Patricia still works nowadays as a data analyst for Industry 4.0, combining this work with teaching at the Mondragon University.

Patricia Riego showed us how important it is to fight for what you want, to do what you really like and to face challenges by working hard. She confessed that, at the beginning, it wasn’t easy to adapt to the language of engineers and the rhythms of industry but, with a lot of effort, she managed to do it and improved a lot. Today, Patricia wants to continue solving industrial problems and proposing improvements.