Suze grew up in Amsterdam and enrolled in Environmental Economics at Wageningen University, a degree that essentially means "I care about the planet but I'm keeping my options open." Somewhere between statistics and environmental theories, hands-on skills and technical challenge was missing. Suze has a low tolerance for ideas that live exclusively on paper. How about a solution, a project, a prototype? “Isn’t a theory without an application just a very long way of describing something you haven't figured out yet?”, she says with a smile.
So, back to Amsterdam! The AI minor was supposed to be just that, a minor. But one course led to another, she picked up Computational Science, and somewhere along the way the theory had done its job. A direction had quietly formed: she wanted to work with data.
Rather than jumping straight into a master's degree, Suze decided to gain real-world experience first. She'd heard of Aurai's trainee programme through someone she knew, filled in the contact form on the website, “and now I’m here”, she laughs.
Suze joined Aurai's trainee programme just before things really took off. At the time, eight trainees were in a single room, five days a week, working through training after training. "It was intense, but also incredibly fun," she says. After the programme, trainees were placed at clients, meaning that after 12 months you eventually settle there permanently. She did not settle there permanently. The environment was structured, stable, and predictable, which left her a little restless."I knew pretty quickly that this was not the environment for me," she says. "I like working across different areas, a bit more pressure and just learning new things as much as possible." In other words: back to Aurai.
These days, Suze works on two GenAI-related projects at VodafoneZiggo. One more established, one newer, focused on customer service automation and work with LLMs. "I do the data engineering side of things," she says, "but it's nice to be close to that application layer too. It sits right at the intersection, it's nice to work on an real-world AI implementation in a company context."
What she finds most satisfying is the full arc: taking something from nothing to production. "When you've been building on something for a while, and it actually works, people are pushing to gather insights from what you have provided, which is genuinely satisfying," she says. "Even if they only ever care about the pretty dashboard and have no idea what's running underneath it", she says laughing. Right now, no two days look the same, which is exactly how she likes it.
Suze is open about the fact that starting out wasn't always easy. Impostor syndrome, a steep learning curve, and the occasional situation that required a bit more backbone than your average Tuesday, she's had it. She has a “skill” for calling things as she sees them, without making it a bigger deal than it needs to be. "It's intimidating at first, being the least experienced person in the room," she says. "But I just ask when I don't know something. I never saw the point in pretending otherwise." What helps, she thinks, is having people around you to learn from and at Aurai and Xomnia, there are plenty.
At the same time, she describes the culture at the companies with real warmth. "You can call us a bunch of nerds who are also surprisingly socially skilled," she says, and she means it as the highest compliment. "Everyone is genuinely interested in what you're working on. People share knowledge freely. And when I say I want to learn something, I know it'll be taken seriously."
What sets Aurai apart, for Suze, is knowing that when she speaks up, something actually happens. "You have to take initiative yourself, that's just the deal," she says. "But when you do, people genuinely think about how to make it work"
When asked where she sees herself in the future, Suze doesn't give a job title. Instead, she describes a feeling: being able to run a project end-to-end, both on an organisational and a technical level, ideally in a sector with real-world impact. Nature, sustainability, agriculture. That thread from Wageningen hasn't entirely disappeared.
For now, though, she's focused on learning as much as she can, working on projects that challenge her, and, in her words: "just doing a lot," which, if you know Suze, sounds about right.
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