We started the day by visiting the Vrije Universiteit (VU) campus in Amsterdam. We were given a tour by current VU students and I was really surprised by how similar it felt to the Pitt campus. First of all, the main building already gave major Posvar vibes with its concrete structure, similar interior design, and its own Einstein type stand. The Netherlands is incredibly diverse and VU was no exception. Out of their 31,000 students, 6,000 are international and over 130 nationalities are represented. A university is essentially a business, so I began to wonder how they attract “customers” from all over the world. While the central location of the campus and the actual campus feel are probably some reasons, I think a major selling point might be the price. The tuition for European students is around €3,000 and for outside of Europe students it’s around €15,000. For comparison to an American University, this is about a third of the price I pay for out of state tuition at Pitt. And the facility and cafeteria food were quite nice as well, so they didn’t slack on the campus experience.
Next, we went to see a hangar in the Schiphol Airport to learn about the behind the scenes of KLM Dutch Airlines and how their planes get from an idea among engineers to flying passengers and cargo. What I thought was especially interesting was that the crafting of their aircraft from scratch doesn’t happen very often. Rather than constantly building new aircraft, existing aircraft are updated periodically. This happens at the facility we visited today. All of the engine testing and maintenance occurs here. This is not only much more cost effective but also, you guessed it — sustainable. They reduce waste drastically by taking old parts that need to be replaced and either reusing them for common items like soda cans or sending them to GE to be melded and reused for new airplane parts. Clearly, all of this requires the supply chain because the parts are not able to be broken down and melded and recrafted all in one place. There are specific suppliers, like GE that do this. Of course, this is done off site, but it all does happen so that the plane ultimately flies passengers and cargo.
Another thing that KLM does is sell their unwanted aircraft to other airlines instead of wasting it. They essentially “remodel” the plane to suit the new owners. One aspect of this in particular is the exterior paint job that needs to be done because as you might imagine, the KLM logo looks nothing like the Southwest logo for example. This job causes a lot of fumes and requires special facilities with advanced air filters, which is too costly to handle on site, so KLM sends this to a third party company to get this done before the plane can be flown and accessible to passengers. This third party company is one of KLM’s suppliers in the supply chain.
For dinner, we went to a cultural center that has a rather unique business model focused on giving back to the community. It rents out the rooms to companies for conferences and events and with the profits from that, they take and plan free events that share culture for the public to attend. I feel like this is less of an occurrence in the US. At least, I personally haven’t seen many businesses run this way. The food itself was absolutely delicious. We had a refreshing classic salad, couscous, and vegan vegetable stew.
