In bright sunshine, a group of alumni visited the old place of work in Krefeld. The mechanical engineering alumni had graduated 13 years ago and used a weekend together to also visit the Hochschule Niederrhein. Alumni coordinator Karla Kaminski welcomed the group at the main entrance and gave an overview of the current facts and figures.

First memories of "back then" were awakened with an (anonymized) grade overview of the mechanics written examination with Professor Bischoff-Beyermann. The grade average was quite respectable. The memory of the dreaded written examination with the now retired Professor Schüffler awakened less good feelings, but nevertheless also the wish: "That would be great if he were here now".

The tour started with a visit to the paternoster, which was unfortunately shut down on Saturday. Instead of a round trip, however, there was at least a group photo. On the campus itself, a lot has happened since the alumni graduated. The J-building did not exist at that time and of course the construction and the energy supply aroused the interest of the mechanical engineers. The redesign of the Mensavorplatz with its seating and seating on the concrete surround also attracted attention. Memories of parties in the AStA basement and the favorite kebab stand came up.

Then it was on to the racing team, where the team management, Niklas Kaaf and Frederic Schiwan, gave an overview of the idea of building racing cars and Formula Student.

Before going to the workshop to see the race cars, there was a surprising reunion. Professor Schüffler had taken the liberty of personally cycling to the campus to meet his former students. The surprise and joy was great on both sides. And even the confession of one or the other that they had looked for and found a "bypass" solution - i.e. had written a different written examination than the math examination with Professor Schüffler - did not dampen the good mood.

During the final tour of the racing team's race cars, one or two alumni certainly felt a bit nostalgic, because the racing team was founded at the time they were graduating and leaving the Hochschule Niederrhein.

While discussing the technical details and finer points of race car construction, the two team leaders of the racing team explained where the team and the race car see themselves in a good position and where things could be even better. The alumni's offer of support was not long in coming. So it may be that one or the other alumnus will be involved in building the race car in the future after all.

It was a successful reunion and when the alumni meet again, hopefully there will still be the Paternoster round trip.

Volker Wilde chose Shrove Monday of all days to visit "his" university of applied sciences in Krefeld 38 years after graduating. On this day, the university is usually closed for carnival. This year was no exception. Volker Wilde took a look around anyway, of course, and only recognized the main entrance. There he was met by our janitor Volker Thelen and after a short conversation he was invited to ride the paternoster again. This invitation was gladly accepted and a round was taken. Volker Wilde wrote to us: "We would like to thank you again and congratulate you on having such a friendly janitor." Our janitor Volker Thelen was of course happy about this praise, but also about one or the other story that our alumnus Volker Thelen gave to the best.

We are happy about everyone who comes to visit us again. If you would like to ride the paternoster again or be guided around the campus with your alumni group, please contact Karla Kaminski at alumni(at)hs-niederrhein.de or call 02151-822 2942.

The racing team, led by Niklas Kaaf and Frederic Schiwan, is currently working on the production of the latest racing car after a successful design phase.

The RS-23C will be presented for the first time at the rollout on Friday, June 16, 2023 in the main auditorium of the Hochschule Niederrhein at Reinarzstrasse 49 in Krefeld. Subsequently, the events in Hockenheim and Spielberg are on the agenda.

In the meantime, the racing team is supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Prof. Dr. Michael Heber was in charge of the racing team for ten years and sees his departure from the racing team with both a smile and a tear in his eye.

A highlight of his time was certainly the first endurance race in Varano de' Melegari in Italy, where a defective part had to be flown in from Krefeld at short notice. However, he also remembers with regret that, for example, a dispute within the team could not be settled. Overall, however, the positives outweigh the negatives. In addition to having fun at the races, Prof. Heber has learned a lot about race car construction and, above all, through the intensive cooperation with the students, has understood how "the young people tick. In addition, many friendships have developed and contact continues to be maintained with former team members, which can always be observed at the annual rollout.

He has chosen his successor Julia Kessler with great care and naturally wishes her all the best and much success.

Professor Kessler believes that accompanying the team is the best way to get into direct contact with the students. The combination of mechanical and electrical engineering, plus the business component through, for example, the cost reports, a great team and a lot of fun, is how she sums up the positive aspects of her task. She also sees the connection to her field of teaching, Mechanical and Process Engineering, and is happy to be able to "take students by the hand". For her, it is an honor to have been chosen to accompany the great team and so she did not think twice about taking on the office.

She sees herself as a role model, because women are unfortunately still underrepresented in the racing team and in the technical area. She herself had - for lack of existing female role models - a male professor as a role model, who was able to transmit values unconsciously and took her seriously as a student. The result is the realization that technology is also a "women's thing" and she has gone from one horsepower in her private life, in the forest and nature with dog and horse, to many horsepower in the racing team via biomedical engineering. Increasing the quota of women in the racing team is one wish, but beyond that, Julia Kessler naturally has clear goals for the future. The smell of gasoline and the noise at the race are almost impossible to imagine without, but still the future will be in the e-racing car. And that, along with even better cooperation between the faculties involved within the university, are important elements in her work with the racing team. We wish Julia Kessler all the best and a lot of fun with the whole team!

With spring and post-Corona, the graduation ceremonies of the individual faculties start again. The Faculty of Applied Social Sciences in Mönchengladbach kicked things off. No less than 200 graduates from the classes of 2019 to 2023 met in April for official honors and farewells. Due to the cancelled celebrations in the Corona years, there was now some catching up to do, and so the celebrations were held in parallel in no less than two lecture halls. Afterwards, there was an extensive celebration in the courtyard and even the brief thunderstorm did not dampen the mood. Equipped with gowns and graduation hats, numerous souvenir photos were taken. There were beaming faces not only among the graduates, but of course also among the parents, spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends and children present. The photo of the evening was probably taken by the graduates who managed to lure Prof. Borg-Laufs in front of the camera. And so the dean also got a photo with many beaming faces that evening.

The photos of the ceremony are available for download. The link was sent to the graduates by the administration of the faculty.

Meanwhile, the next graduation ceremonies are not long in coming. On the day of the Campusfest, May 17, the Faculty of Industrial Engineering said goodbye to its graduates, the Faculty of Health Care will be there on June 2, and in Mönchengladbach the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics will celebrate on June 17, closely followed by the Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology on June 23, before the Faculty of Chemistry presents its students with their graduation certificates at the Krefeld West Campus.

A lot has happened between Adlerstrasse and Frankenring since June 2022. A new building with 1521 square meters of usable space is being constructed on the Krefeld West campus of the Hochschule Niederrhein (HSNR), which will provide future chemists and chemical engineers with an ideal working environment that meets the latest standards.

In the meantime, half-time has been reached on the construction site of the chemical engineering center. The Corona pandemic, the war in Ukraine, general price increases and supply bottlenecks for certain materials -- all this has hit the construction industry in the last two years.

However, the university has managed to keep the new building both on budget and on schedule with only minimal deviations. The chemical technical center is a mammoth project, costing around 25 million euros and receiving 7 million euros in funding from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

And: "Because the general contractor Derichs & Konertz stocked up sufficiently on construction steel early on, there were no bottlenecks here," says university architect Philipp Webels. In the run-up to the planning phase, he precisely determined the needs of the university and represented the interests of HSNR in the planning process.

In terms of personnel, everything was also well managed on the construction site, so that Corona outages hardly restricted the work. The bottom line is that, as things stand, the schedule will only be slightly delayed from December to January of next year. That's when the opening is scheduled.

The windows have already been installed. The technical finishing work is currently underway. Drywall construction is in full swing. This week, work will also begin on installing the red clinker on the exterior facade.

This is what The Hochschule Niederrhein has in mind: The two-and-a-half-story complex houses highly specialized chemistry labs on the first floor, a foyer with a learning landscape, and ancillary rooms such as storage, restrooms and a locker room. The upper floor houses further laboratories, eight staff offices, a conference room and other ancillary rooms, while the top floor houses the technical control center.

The new building is necessary, among other things, because there are no adequate escape routes in Building P, where the chemistry laboratories are currently located. In addition, the accommodation of the laboratories no longer meets today's technical standards.

The rooms that will be freed up in buildings P, U and S by the move to the Chemistry Technical Center will be used for other teaching and learning purposes. Complex P will be extensively renovated in a few years.

Because the HSNR attaches great importance to sustainability in its university development plan, general planner Carpus + Partner has always taken the issue into account in the design. By voluntarily meeting the KWK 55 energy standard, 27 percent less energy is consumed than if only the current regulation were implemented. In addition, the university complies with the BNB Silver standard and is planning, among other things, a photovoltaic system on the green roof.

Porcelain sex toys

This headline has gone through the press in 2022 and has made some readers curious about what is behind it. And that is Alina Eynck. After completing her studies in product design at the Hochschule Niederrhein and a subsequent master's degree in product design and process development at the TH Köln, she set up her own company for porcelain sex toys. The founding idea is of a very practical nature, because "there are no guidelines for sex toys regarding the ingredients and there are no clear limits for harmful substances. As a result, toys made of plastic often contain harmful substances that affect fertility and hormone balance and can be carcinogenic," says Alina Eynck. For her sensual porcelain design, she received the prestigious Red Dot Design Award in 2022. The jury explained its decision: ""Porzelina's sex toy series takes an exciting new approach to this market segment with its unusual choice of materials. Moreover, the aesthetic appearance in white is very appealing."

She sees the roots for her brand "Porzelina" (www.porzelina.de) in the workshops of the Hochschule Niederrhein. There she discovered experimentation and play as a learning concept not only for her own design in terms of the interplay of materials and shaping, but also for her life plan and career. Even if this lightness is sometimes lost to her in everyday life today, she always tries to return to it. In studies, you also always meet inspiring people. For her, one of them is Knut Michalk from the Faculty of Design. "I admire his calmness, patience and tolerance. It was certainly sometimes exhausting to exciting to accompany young people in their ideas. Especially when they are such extraordinary ideas, like porcelain dildos." She associates the typical student life with freedom and creativity, that one is simply allowed to do things and that mistakes are also allowed to happen, from which one learns. This also includes personal development and finding the place that suits you. The fact that development doesn't end with a degree in design became clear to Eynck when she started her career and realized that she also enjoyed working with numbers. During her design studies, the very idea of taking a course in business administration was completely absurd. And despite her origins in design, the entrepreneur's everyday life today is dominated by management, finance, marketing and sales. Product design only takes up space in phases. Even after completing her bachelor's degree, it was clear to her that design would only be part of her professional future, even though she had been well prepared for the job as a product designer. With her master's degree, she reoriented herself and became comfortable with the idea of being an entrepreneur as well as a designer. A good decision, considering her successes. And with the knowledge of her life path, if she were to study again, she would study design again. Perhaps supplemented by a few courses from the textile and clothing sector in Mönchengladbach.

Perhaps this wish is also driven a bit by the nostalgia with which she remembers the summers in the inner courtyard of the university at the Krefeld-West site, when everyone worked on their projects in the workshops and people met in the courtyard during breaks. Perhaps the funniest memory she associates with the morning after the faculty exhibition: "I'm pretty sure that neither prof nor students had gotten much sleep. Possibly there was also a seamless transition from party to examination... in any case, the mood had something of gallows humor. I could hardly concentrate, and the mischievous, exasperated looks among each other evolved into a lively group effort. In the presence and friendly acquiescence of the teacher. I think it was just a test and not an important exam performance, nevertheless at this point: thanks for the indulgence!".

The Degree programme in Design has created lasting relationships and produced incredibly diverse personalities. She is still in contact with many people from the studies and appreciates this very much. And Alina Eynck also has a career tip up her sleeve, because even though she had many jobs to finance her studies, internships have brought her a lot in terms of her career and she is looking forward to being able to offer these valuable experiences as an entrepreneur herself.

Shortly before the editorial deadline, we received the news that Alina had won the first Founder's Prize of the Gemeinschaft Junger Unternehmer (GJU) Krefeld e.V. (Association of Young Entrepreneurs). Congratulations!

Are you looking for motivated trainees for your company? Then NEXT STEP Niederrhein is the right place for you. The joint project of the Hochschule Niederrhein and the Hochschule Rhein-Waal offers companies from the region the opportunity to become visible as a potential employer for students who have dropped out of university:

Students who have doubts about their studies can get neutral advice on their options at NEXT STEP and can also find a list of companies on the project website that want to give dropouts a chance for an apprenticeship, internship or direct career entry. The list of companies is public, free of charge and thus a building block for you to become visible to potential employees in times of a shortage of skilled workers.

Students who ultimately decide against studies have often carefully considered what their future career path should look like. They are highly motivated and make a conscious decision in favor of an apprenticeship and the employer. In addition, they already bring a certain maturity with them, have already been able to gain initial experience in scientific work through their studies, and may already have theoretical knowledge that they can also bring to your company.

If you are looking for enthusiastic trainees or employees, then become visible for this target group in the company list at NEXT STEP Niederrhein! The prerequisite for inclusion on the list is that your company offers apprenticeships, is located on the left bank of the Lower Rhine, and that you specifically address students who are not interested in studying/graduates who have dropped out of university on your company website.

All companies on the list regularly receive information from the study doubt project NEXT STEP Niederrhein, e.g. in the form of a newsletter, and can participate in various workshops.

Contact and information:

nextstep(at)hs-niederrhein.de or https://www.next-step-niederrhein.de/unternehmen/

We store the data you provide in the alumni contact database of the Hochschule Niederrhein and use it exclusively for sending the newsletter or other information from the Hochschule Niederrhein. These will be sent either by post or as an unencrypted e-mail. You can unsubscribe at any time. According to §§ 18, 19 DSGVO, you have the right to request information from the university about the data stored about you and/or to have incorrectly stored data corrected. We do not pass on your data to third parties. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter or other information from The Hochschule Niederrhein, please let us know.