For the past 6 months I have been in Eindhoven, Netherlands, writing my master's thesis with ASML. I have been exploring the Netherlands, finding friends to train with, and spending a lot of time at ASML. It has generally been a good time, and in this blog post I will tell you more about my experience.

Read the thesis (PDF)
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Life in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is a lovely country. It is the perfect place for someone who likes walkable cities that are built for people, not for cars. Almost every other weekend I took the train to a new place to explore, and I was always impressed by how easy and fast it was to travel. I visited both the big cities and some smaller ones in the countryside; most are built beautifully around the rivers, with boats travelling through them. Eindhoven was not a nice-looking city though. It felt quite industrial, with the main things being ASML, Philips, and a university. They were building basically around the entire center, and even though I can imagine it getting better once they finish, it did not look nice as of now.

The Netherlands is also notoriously difficult for housing. I was super lucky, finding a colleague at ASML who was renting out a small 15 square meter studio for €700 a month, only 7 km from the city center and 6 km from ASML.

Although Eindhoven had its flaws, it had an amazing Saturday market with extremely cheap vegetables and good cheese. I am a big fan of markets, and it was so nice that wherever I went on a Saturday there was one to enjoy.

Canal full of boats on a sunny day Market stall with crates of cheap vegetables

Cycling everywhere

Cycling is huge in the Netherlands, both for transport and as training. Everyone has a bike and uses it a lot. The absolutely massive bicycle garages are always quite full, and the priority given to bikes changes how easy it is to get around. I had to stop for three traffic lights on my way to work, and that felt like a lot compared to the single one when cycling into the center. Now in Sweden, I cannot even count the number of stops I have to make on a single ride.

The roads are also built for cyclists, there is ALWAYS a lane for bikes, no matter if you are on a side street in the city or out on a country road. This brings me to road cycling, which is also very popular. Most people pick up cycling once they start studying, which creates a lot of friendly and welcoming cycling clubs. I joined one myself (Squadra Veloce) and bought a cheap road bike to be able to take part in their practices. The group rides were great, there could be up to 60 people split into 3 groups. This was combined with some general triathlon training.

View from the bike on a wide Dutch cycling path Coffee stop during a group ride, helmets on the table

Working at ASML

ASML is a cool company. Their product needs to be incredibly precise, measuring distance in atoms and temperature in millikelvin, and their new EUV machine is on another planet. I learned a lot, both in technical skills, but more importantly in how big companies work. I had a supervisor who pushed me to learn more about the company, which I am grateful for, and in general people are really smart, almost everyone I worked with had a PhD.

There were some frustrating things though. Such a large company becomes quite bureaucratic and slow. The IT systems were awful: stupid Windows machines that barely handled PowerPoint with all the bloat on top of them. There was no common GitHub in use, and I had to use Microsoft Copilot Chat as my AI coding assistant. The pay was also quite low as an intern, but if you actually land a job there you get some really nice benefits. Beyond it being well paid, everyone gets 40 days of vacation.

The thesis itself

I was in the thermal control department in D&E, collaborating with Research and one of their data science teams. I am not going to go too deep into the thesis here, but I explored a neural network approach to thermal modelling, applying parameter prediction, with neural networks as general function estimators, to lumped thermal models, meant to make them more accurate.

Schematic of the thesis method: a neural network takes the current temperatures and inputs and predicts parameters for a lumped thermal model, which computes the temperatures for the next time step

Writing a master's thesis does bring some difficulties that need to be handled. It was difficult to scope correctly and to keep a time plan that actually holds. To be honest, I could have been more proud of the thesis itself. At times it also felt quite pointless, since it felt like something Claude Code would be able to come up with in two days and a tiny bit of direction. It was quite boring at times, and the most fun part was the stress at the end when the deadlines were creeping up.

What's next

I have moved back to Stockholm and started working at Spiich, a startup here in Sweden, and I am having a great time so far. More on that later! The difference in pace compared to a large company like ASML is enormous, and so far it fits me much better. Still, my six months at ASML were a good experience. Thanks to my supervisor Alejandro Marquez Ruiz for all the support during the thesis, and to everyone else who made my time there what it was.

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