Good Tuesday everyone!
At the beginning of the second day of our mission, we went to the city of Erding, located in the southern suburbs of Munich. We started with the visit of Biersack-Brunner, a consulting engineering firm, realizing the architecture and structural design for buildings in the residential, commercial and institutional sector. The company with 20 engineers and architects has been in existence for 15 years now. We enjoyed a contact of choice for the realization of this visit: Stéphanie Bélair-Pageau, graduate of ÉTS in Construction engineering who achieved a master degree in Germany and working in the firm for almost 2 years now.
The co-president of the company, who is around 40 years old, started the session by telling us about the company’s main areas of business, in addition to highlighting their key strengths, namely the: listening to the customer, efficient communication between the different actors and the advantage of offering a turnkey project where architects and engineers can work together for the same company, which is strictly forbidden in Quebec.
They also presented several of their ongoing and already completed projects in the region. Several of these are rehabilitations of historic buildings as we can found everywhere in Germany, extensions or changes of vocation because space is very limited in Germany for new real estate developments.
We then realized a complete visit of the offices distributed mainly in three parts: architecture, structure and fire protection. We felt very welcome by the employees who enjoyed sharing their respective projects and their current tasks.
Stéphanie finished the meeting with a presentation on her personal journey. It was very interesting to learn more about a Canadian ÉTS expatriate who started an international career. She tackled the challenges she overcame, cultural adaptation to work, distance from her family, the engineering profession in Germany, the importance of keeping her contacts network in Quebec, and she certainly made some people of the group dream by showing her ambition and her passion.