Elvira van Straten (1988) doesn’t want to miss any opportunities. She not only combined her studies in Medical Physics with a part-time job, but also two club memberships and a variety of board positions. And when she fell in love, she chose a new life on the other side of the world with that same amount of determination.
You live and work in Sydney, Australia. How did you end up all the way over there? “I took a gap year to travel the world between my Bachelor’s and my Master’s. While I was in Argentina, I met an Australian, and we are still together today. He came to visit me in the Netherlands several times, and he even lived here for a year, but then his visa expired and he had to return home. I had an opportunity to do my Master’s internship abroad, so I went to live and work in Sydney for nine months to be closer to him. After I earned my degree, I decided to look for a job in Australia too. It was a major decision, but it was also a great adventure.”
Was it easy to find work in Sydney? “No, it’s a difficult job market, especially if you don’t know anyone. Everything here revolves around connections. In the first few months, I must have sent out more than 30 applications, and I didn’t even receive a reply for most of them. Eventually I found a job at AbbVie, an international company that develops pharmaceuticals, via a recruiter in the Netherlands. Now I have a permanent contract.”
‘Sometimes I have to reject a whole shipment of medication’
What do you do at AbbVie?“I’m a Quality Assurance Associate, responsible for quality control. I work in the Quality Department, where I’m responsible for medical equipment. My main tasks involve checking whether new products meet national and international regulations, and ensuring that the distribution runs smoothly. Sometimes I have to make painful decisions. For example, if an air shipment of products to Sydney spends too much time waiting in Dubai, then the medicine might have spent too much time in the heat. The packages have sensors, and if I see that they’ve registered temperatures that are too high, even just a few degrees, then I have to reject the entire shipment.”
Is that the kind of work you had in mind when you started your studies? “I didn’t really know what I wanted, and I was interested in a lot of different things. I chose Medical Physics precisely because it’s such a broad field of study. That way, I wouldn’t have to rule out too many options. I also considered becoming a clinical physicist, and this study programme would have been a good preparation for that. In the end, I didn’t go down that path, because I would have had to spend at least another eight years at university, and the job market is tight. I got my current job thanks to my part-time job at Sanquin, the organisation for blood donation and supply. That organisation not only makes sure that Dutch hospitals have enough blood on hand, but they also have a factory in Amsterdam where they produce complex pharmaceuticals based on blood. I worked at that factory all through my university years as a quality assistant, and later as a quality control manager. I liked it so much that I went looking for a similar job when I got to Australia. My work experience certainly helped: most of the questions they asked during my interview at AbbVie were about precisely that.”
‘I chose Medical Physics precisely because it’s such a broad field of study’
What kind of student were you at the VU? “I wanted to get the most out of everything. I was a member of several boards, at both the student associations MENS and D.E.R.M. I also spent every free hour working at Sanquin. And I did two Master’s studies, but that was due mainly to a hasty choice of study programmes. After my Bachelor’s, I wanted to study radiotherapy, but I didn’t want to go through all of the math and physics classes again. So I chose the Oncology Master’s instead of Medical Physics. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise that at Oncology all of the lectures ended after a few months, and then you had to spend the remaining year and a half in the lab. So I enrolled in the Medical Physics Master’s programme too, because I don’t quit something once I’ve started it.”
What did you think of Medical Physics? “It was a good fit, thanks to the combination of exact science and commercial applications. That combination is reflected in my current job too: I have to understand how the medication works, but I also have to make sure that we can meet the patients’ demands. It was also a very small study programme; we had groups of less than 30 students. At the end, I had courses with just five to seven other people. That gave it a very personal atmosphere: it was easy to talk to the lecturers, and you got to know the other students very well. I only realised how unique that was when we had the occasional class with the Medicine study programme. They had 10 times as many first-year students, and the rules were a lot more strict than we were accustomed to.”
‘I think that career opportunities are increasing, because the digital technologies are developing so rapidly.’
Where do the programme’s students find work after graduation? “When I look at my classmates, it’s fairly diverse. Some of them are working on PhDs, while others went into consultancy. For my part, I decided to go into business early on in my studies. If there are students who would like to do that as well, I would recommend that they find a job while they’re still in school, so that they can become acquainted with the world outside of the VU. I think that career opportunities are increasing, because the digital technologies are developing so rapidly. Look at 3D printers, for example: they’re playing a larger and larger role in the medical world. And as a graduate, you not only know how the technology behind it works, you also know how you can apply it in a hospital. The study also gives you a good foundation in programming; knowledge that is becoming ever more important.”
What are your ambitions for the future? “We’re not sure how long we’ll stay in Australia. I’d like to eventually be able to spend more time with my family and friends. But for the moment, I don’t plan on leaving AbbVie. I have a great job, and I have plenty of opportunities to develop further as a Quality Assurance Associate. In the long term, I think I might want to go into management, or perhaps more towards the medical side of the business. AbbVie’s medicines are mainly produced outside of Australia, so I’m not very involved in that. I think it might be interesting to get more involved in that as well.”
CV blok
