My MAP internship with Evonik

I start­ed my in­tern­ship at Evo­nik in July 2021. Dur­ing my in­tern­ship, I had to work on three chal­leng­ing pro­jects. The skills I ac­quired from the Elite Graduate Program "Advanced Materials and Processes" (MAP) were very useful and con­tributed to the suc­cess of the in­tern­ship.

A dream I had before com­ing to Ger­many to join MAP was to work in the field of chem­ical pro­cess simu­lation and opti­misa­tion. This is a field I was very much in love with. Be­fore join­ing MAP, as al­ways when I em­bark on a new jour­ney in life, I had my doubts whether the pro­gram was the best choice for me. How­ever, the inter­disci­pli­nary nature of MAP, the fact that it is inter­na­tional, and its “elite” sta­tus were all fac­tors that led me to my deci­sion to join the pro­gram – a deci­sion for which I am now very grate­ful.

I first got to know Evo­nik in one of the soft skills courses we were of­fered as MAP stu­dents by Dr. An­dreas Hoff, Sen­ior Vice Presi­dent of Evo­nik’s pro­cess tech­nolo­gy and engi­neer­ing de­part­ment, who is also a mem­ber of the MAP advi­sory board. Evo­nik is one of the world’s lead­ing spe­cialty chem­icals com­pa­nies. I be­came very inter­ested in Evo­nik and de­cided to apply for an in­tern­ship. A few months lat­er, I was invit­ed for an inter­view and final­ly start­ed my six-month in­tern­ship at Evo­nik in the pro­cess simu­lation team in July 2021.

My expe­rience at Evo­nik was amaz­ing. I got the op­por­tunity to work on three chal­leng­ing pro­jects, one of which was a par­ticu­larly diffi­cult re­search pro­ject. My task was to model the phase sepa­ration of a three-phase mixed sol­vent elec­tro­lyte sys­tem in the poly­mer pro­duc­tion pro­cess. The pro­ject was un­char­tered terri­tory for the Evo­nik team and we had to dis­cover to­gether how we can com­plete it suc­cess­fully. I can defi­nitely say that the courses in MAP helped, espe­cially that I spe­cial­ized in “Ad­vanced Pro­cess­es” and “Computa­tional Mate­rials Sci­ence and Pro­cess Simu­la­tion” for my Focal Sub­jects. What I be­lieve has helped me the most, though, is the skill of learn­ing how to learn. Our aca­demic edu­cation in MAP pre­pares us to deal with com­plex scien­tific con­cepts by learn­ing how to find, un­der­stand, and ana­lyse scien­tific litera­ture. The fact that I also en­coun­tered many dif­ferent sub­jects in MAP that I previ­ously had little con­tact with made me more confi­dent when tack­ling new prob­lems.

In the end, my in­tern­ship was very suc­cess­ful. And due to this suc­cess, I was also of­fered a mas­ter’s thesis at Evo­nik in the field of mod­elling car­bon diox­ide cap­ture by amines. Such work had al­ways been a dream of mine before com­ing to Ger­many, and I am very grate­ful for hav­ing the op­por­tunity to pur­sue it.
 

Text: O­mar Ze­air, student of the Eli­te­ Graduate Program “Ad­van­ced Ma­teri­als and Pro­ces­ses” (MAP)