Our team part 2: Mikko

As a person I’ve always considered myself to be laidback. As mentioned in one of our meetings my spirit animal, the Sloth, might tell something about me. I love great food (as you can see in the picture) and I love music so much that I consider it being kind of a lifeline for me. Outside of schoolwork I’m also an active board member in few of TUT’s clubs which in a way I’ve sometimes considered being a hobby for me.

So I’m a third year student at TUT and I’ve found myself to be working in the Smart Waste Flow Demola-project as the Project Manager. Applying for this project wasn’t a difficult choice since I worked for the project company Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto in the past summer in in one of their landfills. The summer job experience has been really useful in the project so far and I think I will draw ideas from the experience throughout the project.

My road to study environmental engineering at TUT hasn’t been the most straightforward. I was born and raised in the windy city of Lahti. After high school and a year of service in the army I moved from Lahti, the Chicago of Finland, to Jyväskylä aka the Athens of Finland to study physics at the University of Jyväskylä. Studying pure physics for little over a year made me realize that I might like more the technical side of things - so in 2013 I found myself in Tampere, the Manchester of Finland, studying automation technology at Tampere University of Technology.

The summer before I began at TUT I worked as a garbage truck driver. The salary was quite good and so as few of my friends also had a little extra in their pocket we decided to go backpacking around South-East Asia and Tanzania. Throughout the experiences I had travelling and working as a garbage man I found out that the World could need some problems solvers in the environmental field. So, as I was sitting on a heap of plastic bottles that had been washed away on the shore on a small island in the coast of Tanzania, I filled out the program exchange application to study environmental engineering. From that point on I’ve been eager to find out new solutions in the way we handle our waste.

- Mikko -