News from our alumni members. Experience report from Misi Nagy (part II)
Mihály Nagy was an undergraduate student in technical earth sciences at the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Engineering of the University of Miskolc for 7 semesters, from September 2018 to December 2021. He joined the TEKH Vocational College at the beginning of his studies and was a key member of it throughout. Misi tried his luck in the wider world, he is currently studying abroad (between 2022 and 2024) and working, but he keeps in touch with us regularly.
Below is Misi's experience report on the RACE competition. (The previous part of the series, in which Misi talked about his studies in Lisbon, can be read by clicking here.)
“I first came across RACE (The Raw and Circular Economy Expedition) when I was in Lisbon with my friends preparing for the Tapojärvi Innovation Challenge competition announced by EIT (European Institute of Innovation & Technology). (Unfortunately we didn't make it.) As it piqued my interest, I applied early on, but I still didn't have a place. I didn't even think about it for long, only when I got the email at the beginning of the summer that a place had opened up so I could go if I still wanted to. And I still wanted to.
This year's RACE started in Lisbon and ended in Barcelona, with several stops in Spain. For me, this was convenient, as it meant I could just walk my suitcase from my room in Lisbon, where I spent the 2022/2023 academic year, to the starting point of the challenge.
There were about 70 participants in the challenge. Students came from all over the world. Most of them were from EIT masters programmes (e.g. AMIR, SINReM), but of course not exclusively from there. It was a pleasant surprise to meet two students from Miskolc, Moataz and Mohamed. What was even more surprising that I also met people who had spent some time studying in Miskolc as part of their EIT Master degree.
The RACE is a two-week intensive programme, the aim of which is that by the end of the programme, each team of ten teams of 5-6 people need to come up with a start-up idea for one of the given problems and present it in a seven-minute "pitch" on the last day. This was not an easy task.
Four challenges were set by the sponsoring companies:
- the use of ore (mainly iron) waste and tailings,
- the processing of iron waste using mining equipment (e.g. crushers),
- the concentration of industrial water,
- the processing of copper waste.
After much debate, my team and I chose challenge one. The name of our fictional start-up company was Tailing Analysis Consultancy, which would have assessed the potential of the tailings in the tailing storage facilities – both from a technological and environmental point of view – using geological and geophysical methods.
Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the top 3, but we still gained a lot of unforgettable experience and knowledge during these two weeks.”
Misi Nagy is the third from the left in the picture