Throwback Thursday: Paul Disbeschl (class of 2022)

1. Which place marks for you DACS at UM and why?

It depends on whether you mean DACS or DKE. If I think about DKE, the Bouillonstraat common room (and the quirky layout of the building) immediately comes to mind, together with the common room at Tapijn Z. This is where I spent a lot of my time between lectures an project meetings and where I met up with friends during my bachelor’s and the start of my master’s. As for DACS.. The name change sort of coincided with the second part of my masters, when I spent the majority of my day either at my desk at home due to Covid/ internship/thesis, or at PHS as a teaching assistant. As a full-time employee at DACS now, I associate the name no longer with my desk at home, but with the staff kitchen on the fourth floor, where I spend my lunch breaks chatting with colleagues.?

2. With which professor/teacher from then would you like to drink a coffee with now and why?

That’s a difficult question to answer now that they are my colleagues... There are several people that jump to mind who really made a difference for me during my studies at DACS and to whom I am grateful.?

3. Which class did you love/hate and why?

My favorite course during the bachelor’s was Operations Research Case Studies! This course was all about optimization in all sorts of fields, covering assignment problems, linear programming, Markov decision processes, and more! It made me realize how much fun someone can have when modeling (relatively simple) real-world problems and figuring out optimal solutions to them.

During my master’s, my favorite course was Symbolic Computation and Control. I took the course when all education was online-only (during the first wave of Covid). Despite the uncertainties and the difficulties caused by Covid, Ralf Peeters managed to structure the course in a way that was not just easy to follow, but fun too! Ralf’s detailed and constructive feedback on the assignments, together with the open atmosphere he created in virtual classrooms to discuss topics from the course, made me feel less like I was restricted to my desk at home alone and more like I was in an actual classroom with Ralf and my peers. It made me feel hopeful for the (at that time unsure) future and motivated me to keep trying my best despite the bleak outlook caused my the pandemic.

4. With the benefit of hindsight: What would you advice yourself if you were to start the study now?

Bachelor’s: start studying early! Don’t try to do too much all at once nor try to rush things, since this is neither useful nor sustainable.?

Master’s: consider an internship at a company.

Overall: this is advice Kurt Driessens gave us in the first few weeks of our bachelor’s - 'Keep it simple, stupid!'.

5. For which tasks/opportunities/challenges can other alumni contact you?

Anything really! Be it questions about working in academia as a lecturer, opportunities to work on challenging projects, or more!