#SEIWeTalk: face to face with SEI students | Episode 7
Alejandro Marmolejo Gutiérrez was born and raised in a little city in Colombia called Armenia, where he spent his early life until he finished high school. Afterwards, he moved to Cali to study civil engineering at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. While studying he had the opportunity to participate in a double-degree program between his university and Politecnico di Torino, so in 2017 he moved to Italy for a master with a focus on hydraulics: “water is our main resource and I want to learn to preserve it and to use it for hydropower production”, he said. He participated in SEI Inventor 2020 Fall Edition and he’s currently collaborating with SEIplus.
How did you find out about SEI Inventor?
I discovered SEI Inventor through Politecnico’s email. I then started to research about SEI and all the activities you carry on and I decided to apply.
What project did you work on during the programme?
My project was called BIP – Burnout Prevention. Burnout is a term used to define a state of continuous high stress at work that, after some time, starts to affect your professional performance as well as your physical and mental health.
What are you working on nowadays?
My life right now is divided in two. I spend half of the time working with SEIplus on the project ToTeM Torino Tech Map. My part of the job is to program and code some new interesting features of ToTeM’s website. On the other half, I work on personal projects that involve, most of them, learning a couple of things that I find useful for the future such as: CFD (computational fluid-dynamics), continuum mechanics and Python.
What are you missing today to become the person you want to be in the future?
I think there are two main things I am missing but I am currently working on them. On the first hand, I needed some emotional intelligence and mental wellbeing, for that I have recently restructured my life to find the balance between work, sports and hobbies. On the other hand I really wanted to start working on something, to find out how the real world is and gain some experience in it, for that I joined SEIplus.
What lessons learned in SEI Inventor do you think you will take with you forever in your bag of essential knowledge?
Three main lessons:
- try and fail. That’s the real message of prototyping in SEI Inventor, to create real stuff that can be tested to fail and learn;
- focus on team work not on individual one;
- for everything you do in your life, find that little fun.
Would you recommend a SEI programme to another person? Why?
Of course I would. I’d do it because it is a chance to work on interesting projects with people from different backgrounds and different origins. Diversity and experiences are the best teachers in the world.
