This article was originally published in Contact Magazine.
Myrthe Snoeks was a Dutch backpacker living and working at a cattle station in regional Queensland when she decided she was going to study engineering and arts at UQ.
Four years on, the third-year student is Managing Director of UQ Space, a 100-strong organisation of students working to become the next generation of leaders in the Australian space industry.
In just two years, the team has become the top-ranked student space organisation in Australia and New Zealand.
In 2021, their ambitions are firmly set on a new world record: to become the first student rocketry team to reach the boundary of space with a student-built rocket, definitive data and a scientific payload.
But for Snoeks, the real sense of achievement isn’t in the rockets – it’s in the people that make them.