Yesterday, I went to an event that completely re-evaluted student-company meetups for me. Organized by Drivhuset, the gathering brought together Uppsala’s most innovative start-ups was with students and alumni.
The event was called “TeamUp 2022” and it took place here:
It took place on a web-based platform called Gather Town – an online world where each attendant participated virtually through controlling a little pixelated character. It looked like games like Habbo and Blipville. When signing into the platform I could customize the appearance of my character and its clothes. I tried to make him look like me but added a pair of oculus rift goggles, because why not.
Then in the world I could walk around as my character approaching other people’s characters, which was interesting. When my character was next to another character our live videos and microphones was shared between each other in order mimic a real person to person talk. We could talk and see each other like in face-2-face. This was cool.
At this event there was a ton of startups looking for talents like software developers, data scientists, UX-designers, marketing, business developer as well as engineers and they offered everything from thesis work to co-founder positions. This made me realize that there is a lot of opportunities for us industrial engineering and management students out there – we just have to look up a bit from our studies.
As I virtually strolled around in the hustle and bustle, I came across my fellow classmate @Alexander Sundquist who was also astounded by this computer-generated meetup.
Together, we talked to Brandon who is doing his thesis work at the startup NitroCapt. NitroCapt adress the agriculture challenge of Artificial nitrogen fertilizer production today accounting for close to 2% of global CO2 emissions, and being a major emission source of agriculture. Their solution is a 100% fossil-free and emission-free nitrogen fixation where air and water are the only raw materials. They were looking for competencies like business developers and industrial engineers to expand their business and production – an impressive journey ahead.
So, let’s round up this post with two key takeaways from my experience at the event:
- this was an interesting and innovative way of meeting up online. I’m curious to see how the meetup event solutions evolve in the future
- there is a colossal amount of innovative startup ideas out there. If you want to try working in a startup now during the studies, I would really recommend looking into startups in Uppsala. Reach out to Drivhuset or UIC for more info.
To summarize, this was a great event with lots of interesting companies and students. I’m glad I went and think I’ll go next year again.