PhD Alumnus Evert Los

In the same year, he started working at the AERES University of Applied Sciences (located in Dronten, in the Netherlands), where he teaches courses in agricultural (business) economics, financial management and statistics, and supervises students with their thesis and other research/educational projects. He mainly teaches in the program for students in horticulture and arable farming, preparing students to become future agricultural entrepreneurs. “A big difference with Wageningen University is that the study programs at AERES are less academic and more practical”.

Evert is especially attracted by the diversity of activities in his current job, with a combination of teaching, supervising, developing new teaching materials and other projects. He also enjoys the social element of interacting with students and colleagues. Furthermore, through supervising students he gets in touch with a wide variety of practical questions and (research) problems in the current agricultural sector.

“I think I still benefit a lot from my experiences during my time at the AEP group. For example, I gained my first experiences with teaching during my PhD. Furthermore, during my PhD I developed myself from a methodological perspective and via courses and self-study, I acquainted myself with useful skills as an agricultural economist. I also learned a lot from the people that I’ve worked with at AEP about working in an academic and educational environment, for instance, in giving and receiving feedback.” However, Evert also recognizes important differences between his current job and his time as PhD student. “During the PhD you specialize yourself in a specific topic, but in my current job my scope of projects is much wider. However also for that it’s often useful if you first learned to specialize into something and learned how difficult that can be.”