For three years, Wouter Schuit enjoyed studying technical public administration at Delft University of Technology, before switching to a master's degree in philosophy in Leiden after completing his bachelor's degree. 'Both programmes teach you to tackle problems in a structured way.'
Something in healthcare, something in communication, or perhaps sociology? As a secondary school student, Wouter found it difficult to choose a further education programme. The only thing he knew for sure was that it would definitely not be a technical study programme, like his brother had done. And then he came across technical public administration in Delft.
'It turned out to be a summary of everything I found interesting,' he says. 'As a technical public administration specialist, you map out a socio-technical system both technically and socially, after which you give advice on how to improve it. This ranges from transport systems to communication systems, which means you need knowledge of all kinds of fields, such as law, economics and ICT.'
They sometimes call us the bridge builders of a company.
‘Some difficult questions you’re asking there.’
It was within this broad context that Wouter came into contact with philosophy. 'People often told me that I was very philosophical and asked a lot of difficult questions, so when I went to Norway for six months, I took one programming course and three philosophy courses. One of them dealt with the ethical side of technology, for example. I thought that was really cool, so once I was back in the Netherlands, I wrote my thesis on the philosophy behind brain-computer interfaces. Partly thanks to my supervisor, who was also a philosopher, I discovered that I actually wanted to pursue philosophy further.'
text: Myrthe Timmers image: Elif Kırankaya