Get to Know Joris van Schaik

When did you start at Gammadata as service engineer?

I started at Gammadata in January 2012.

Which products from Gammadata do you work with?

Throughout the years I’ve worked with most of the instruments we sell in the Nuclear team, but currently the main focus is on HPGe spectroscopy products and applications. Hidex gamma and scintillation counters and applications are another product line I work with currently. I have also started working with the Thermo FTIR product line roughly 1,5 years ago.

Did you work with similar products previously and if yes , for how many years?

Before I started at Gammadata, I was working at SLU where I was working part time in the gammaspec lab and had responsibility for the equipment there (mostly HPGe-detectors, operated through Apex-Gamma). Apart from that I did a lot of lab work, but using different type of instruments mostly.

What is the most fun about your job at Gammadata?

Personally I really like problem solving, although one may argue that ideally this should leave me unemployed, if everything simply always works as intended :). It’s hard to pick out something in particular as “most fun” – I really thrive with the combination of traveling and meeting customers, having a great team of colleagues at the office and at suppliers, and the overall flexibility and own responsibility for managing our time and cases.

How many “devices” do you handle per months approximately (including PM , repair, training, installation)?

Hard to pin a number to this… typically a couple of instruments per week, both in-house and at customer site. I mostly work with instruments that could be classed as large and expensive, therefore the “throughput” in number of instruments per week is not very high.

Tell us about a project or a situation in your career at Gammadata that you are particularly proud of.

Oh my… tough one. Nothing specific pops to mind I’m afraid. If anything, perhaps my initial few weeks at the company; when I started, we were a team of three service engineers and the plan was for me to tag along with my colleagues, attend training courses and get “warmed up”. Instead, one of them got sick and was at home during several weeks, while the other had scheduled a helicopter pilot training which turned out to start in the beginning of February, rather than late March/April – this left me alone, very inexperienced, but with customer issues to deal with. Quite a challenge, but with remote help from those and other colleagues from the sales team, as well as suppliers, I think it turned out quite ok 🙂

What is your best tip to improve the working day?

Another tough one… in general, don’t forget to eat and take breaks, and socialize with colleagues/customers while at it. Another tip would be that on those days when your mind really isn’t in the right place, simply take the day off and do something else (preferably something you enjoy), rather than force yourself through the “mandatory working hours” without producing anything constructive. Then get back at it the day after, with renewed energy and focus – I find this to be way more productive in the long run.

Do you have any other tips you want to share? For example. something you think is very good or something you think more people should know about? Such as possibility to make an inquiry through our webpage directly or other things.

Maybe the fact that basically all the products we sell do actually come with a manual 🙂

Jokes aside – our updated online form for service requests is good to be aware of and use when you want to ship an instrument for service or repairs. It automatically generates a ticket number/shipment reference, which will be assigned to one of our service engineers.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

When traveling and spending the evenings in a hotel room, I typically enjoy watching a TV show or movie or such. At home I spend quite some time coaching our son’s soccer and innebandy (floorball) team, and watch a lot of their games as well as our daughters soccer teams games. A TV show episode or movie together with my wife/the family in the evening is also a favorite. Some soccer and floorball for myself also (Korpen mostly), and we have a group of guys who like to hit the trails on MTB every now and then. Padel also popped up as an enjoyable hobby. I’m also still a bit of a gamer nerd and enjoy some PC or console gaming occasionally, and every now and then doing a nice PC build.