Today we started our day with a tour of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. There must have been a miscommunication in the planning though, because they thought we were prospective students looking to study at the campus. After the tour we had time to eat, and we went and got poke bowls which have become one of my favorite foods since first moving to Pitt. It was a much bigger bowl than I had expected however, so I could only eat about half of it.
After the tour of the campus, we went to Schiphol airport, which is the same airport we flew into, and got to tour the KLM maintenance division. We got to see the engine testing room, and a plain that was currently undergoing inspection (pictured below). This tour focused a lot on the supply chain idea. The most interesting thing I learned was that every single chemical, part, and piece of equipment that the company uses has a label. This allows them to store everything into a large database, and allows easy access for information such as date of purchase, or where the item was purchased from. For example, if lets say a plane engine was faulty, they would be able to see all of the engines that were produced from the same place and same time as the faulty one, and could recall them all. Something like this requires a huge amount of data analytics, which is one of my 2 intended majors and something that I am leaning towards when it comes to searching for jobs. We got a chance to go into the cabin of the plain as it was undergoing inspection and it was very interesting to see just the framework of such a massive plane, and the complexity of the engine seen below.
After our visit to the airport, we went and got dinner which was pretty decent. The main course we were all sharing was chickpea based (it was all vegan), and I don’t like chickpeas so it didn’t quite fill me up but the couscous was good. After dinner, there was a free event going on in the same building that was the live recording of a podcast about economics. Let’s just say the panelist had some interesting views on economics that I am sure everyone else has gone into more detail on. However, this podcast filming allowed for me to really critically think about what they were saying, and why I believed a lot of what they claimed was extremely optimistic about human nature. Tomorrow we are going to Utrecht to visit Aurea Imaging which should be an interesting visit.