My working experience in Sweden

Peter Schobesberger, 5MMA 2004

On August 27 my journey started in Salzburg. I flew to Arlanda airport via Frankfurt. Sören Holmberg and his wife picked me up at the airport. It took about 45 minutes to drive to Enköping, a small town between Västeras and Stockholm. For the time of my stay in Sweden the company lent me a car. Although I did not care which car I would get, I was very happy that it was a brand new Ford Mondeo. I stayed at the Stadtshotellet, which is situated next to the town square.

I worked for Exos Ventilation, which has about 45 employees. The people at Exos were all friendly and helpful. I enjoyed working with them very much. I picked up some Swedish vocabulary very quickly and I learned how to drink a lot of coffee. My job at Exos consisted of two parts.

1. About half of the time I worked in the office with Sören. There he showed me their calculation program L Plus. My job was to find errors in the calculation, to detect missing files, and to help with the introduction of the new carbon filters. I learned a lot about heat exchangers, fans, pressure drops, humidifiers and much more. I was not sure whether these things would help me as a mechanical engineer, but there were many situations in the last weeks in which this knowledge helped me a lot.
2. The rest of the time I was on site with the service engineer Hĺkan Fredriksson. I saw huge parts of Uppland (the state where Enköping is located). We visited Järna fire station, where we exchanged two ventilation fans. The absolute highlight of my stay was a trip to Helsinki via a big Viking Line ferry. We stayed in Helsinki for three days to fix a huge rotary heat exchanger in a big new building called Life Science Centre. It was great fun to work with Hĺkan and I know many Swedish songs now.

During my spare time I visited Västeras, where I went shopping. Nearly every weekend I went to Stockholm to visit museums, walk around the medieval center Gamla Stan, and drink coffee on Nobel Square. On Friday and Saturday evenings I went to Enköpings’ most popular disco, Ĺgatan 29. I also went to a student party in Uppsala to which I was invited.

On September 26 I flew back to Austria. This was a life experience to work at Exos Ventilation in Enköping.