Topic 1. Background Gosh, that that is not an easy question to begin with. Um. Let us see, I am a I am a civil engineer, I come from the Caribbean. I have a master's in project management. I did my PhD in sustainable architecture, and now I am living in the Netherlands, married, two children to a Dutch guy. Topic 2. Move from engineering to decision making for more sustainable building Well, I started off as an engineer because I thought that that is what my country needed. As a civil engineer, I thought I could build things. And then I realized after I got my engineering degree and I was working in a in a construction company building villas in the Caribbean for a very, very rich people that the natives could not afford, sometimes not doing it in the best way. I thought to myself, I want to work on different types of projects. I want to work on projects that that helped development. And the best way probably to do that was to do project management and then to work, you know, for something that a World Bank project or something like that for development. So I did my master's in project management and not, strictly speaking, engineering. And then I was back working with a utilities company. And I thought to myself, well, we can do a lot of building. But is all the building that we are doing now in the Caribbean the right way to go about it? So I actually started my PhD looking for sustainable building technologies. How can we build and not ruin the environment that we were blessed with? And actually, by the end of my PhD, I thought to myself, and this was already 20 years ago, we have the capacity to build with nature. Why is it not happening? And then. Well, when I when I moved into a postdoc, I wanted to explore not only the engineering capabilities, but what is preventing the decision making, what is preventing the the it from being taken up, all these good engineering ideas. And if you really do some analysis, it is it is a you have to get into the economics and the politics and how they balance each other out. The decisions that are taken are sometimes not the let us say, the optimal engineering choices. They are taken for entirely different reasons. And I suppose we as engineers have to be able to speak that language and step into that frame and to be able to understand how we can make our ideas better solutions. Yeah. Actually be taken up by the decision makers. Topic 3. Picking up career opportunities that came along Never, never, never. I think as a teenager, I did not even know where the Netherlands was. So I think my entire career has been quite, let us say, accidental. I have always been a good student. It was clear that I wanted, you know, I had some talent there. But for the rest, it is been just picking up the opportunities as they came along. I also did not have a lot of money to travel, so I tried to pick the universities that I went to strategically, according to who would give me a scholarship. That is number one. And where it is a different part of the world. Topic 4. Defining year in life I work at a university, so I like this. I like this environment a lot, so I sometimes have difficulty separating the part where I am working and the part where I am studying. For me, it is all been one. But on that one, you have difficulty. Well, I think that, yeah, almost almost everything you do, you try to wake up every day and do something today that gives you more choices tomorrow, you know, so you just you just try to take advantage of the opportunities as they come along. I was never a person to have a five year plan or a 10 year plan. I just tried to do the best that I could in what I am doing now and try to make choices that, you know, set me up for maybe for a nicer things later on. I do not think there was a really defining moment in my in my career path. I think that sometimes things did not work out the way I planned, like I had applied to go to MIT and applied for a scholarship. And I can remember reading the letter that said, no, sorry, we cannot give you any money. And that for me is the same as saying you cannot come because I was from a developing country and sort of on a whim. Then I decided to go study to do my master's in England because they were giving me a scholarship. And I said, Oh, why not? It is one year out of my life, I will do it and see. And it was one of the best years of my life that is actually accepted it. Yeah, it just happened. Yeah. And it turned out to be one of the best years of my life because I met my husband when I was in England studying. I met some of the best friends, graduated top of my class, which led me to me getting a scholarship to do my PhD. So that year was yeah, maybe you could say that was a defining year in my life, but it happened quite accidentally and it came out of a disappointment. Topic 5. Setting realistic expectations Um. I must say, I am very fortunate I did not have very many, but perhaps maybe it is true because I set my expectations in a very realistic way. I have had a lot of support. And although, as I said, I come from a developing country and we did not have a lot, I was just trying to find, you know, ways to to get to a next step. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not work. But I tried not to. Yeah, not to dwell on the on the things that did not work, but to try to see an opportunity to go a different way. Topic 6. Seeking balance and stepping back I disagree. I disagree in everything. You have to seek balance and sometimes you have to step away from your passion in order to get new perspective and to come back with renewed energy. That is just, I think, just a fact of life, you if you keep going and keep going and keep going, there is a danger of becoming of getting into a sort of tunnel where you only see what is in front of you. You have to step back. You have to take the overview. You have to get different perspectives. And sometimes that comes not when you are plugging away at your computer, but when you are on a walk and then you see something differently. Things fall into place differently and that is important. Those insights are even important for your passions. Topic 7. Outro Hi, I am Leslie Zachariah. I am the Secretary General of the idealeague.org. and that is an alliance of five top technical universities in Europe. TU Delft is one. But also there is ETH Zurich, RWTH Aachen, Chalmers University of Technology and Polytechnical in Milan. And these five universities are working together trying to inspire each other to innovate.