I don’t know if I’m the right person to use as a reference point, but at least I can make you think that it’s possible. Anyone can get where I am
Alejandra believes that in life you have to believe in what you want and work hard, but that it is also important to have a bit of luck and meet the right people along the way. She comes from La Paz, a lively, chaotic city where precariousness and difficulties are commonplace, together with a great softness in dealing with situations, a Bolivian way of doing things that makes everything easier and smoother.
For a country like Bolivia, being a woman and being involved in science is still something unusual. Graduating in 2005 in Physics, she was one of the few girls who graduated and wanted to continue her education abroad and coincidentally, a professor from her university, Professor Oscar Saavedra, taught and did research in Italy, at the University of Turin. The first Bolivian to graduate in physics, he reached Italy crossing the Atlantic by boat travelling for three months as he could not afford the cost of the plane. In short, “when you really want something, you do anything to get it” and at the first opportunity, she went to talk to him. He was working on cosmic rays while she was interested in medical physics and although she had no interest in the same field of specialisation, he put her in touch with professors in Turin and in so doing, she obtained a scholarship for her PhD. Thanks to a research agreement between the universities of La Paz and Turin, her degree was easily recognised, and it was just as easy to obtain a visa. On the contrary, the annual renewal of her residence permit in Italy was stressful as she had to submit the documentation almost a year before it expired.
“It was a bit of luck and determination, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t talked to him, he wouldn’t have done anything for me. People don’t do anything unless you speak up”.
Alejandra chose the doctorate in medical physics for a very personal reason, years earlier she lost her grandmother for a cancer and from that moment on, she decided to work in the field. In Italy, she met a second very important person who became a reference figure in her life journey: her Italian supervisor.
Her main research topic was the characterisation of the detector chambers used in hadrontherapy, the radiotherapy that uses hadron particles. Alejandra noted at the time that there were fewer resources for research in Italy than in other European countries, but what struck her was that “there, people do things by themselves, they try to do things the best they can with alternative means and methods, and they succeed!”. Her supervisor, in particular, made sure to find resources everywhere and ensured that each of them had what they needed for research, for exchanges with other universities and also helped them to go further. Alejandra carries the professor, her team and Italy in her heart, which she associates with an idea of freedom.
“My PhD was a transcendental moment in my life, it opened up the world to me. People have always appreciated me for who I am, rather than where I come from. They recognized my worth as an individual who brings a grain of sand to society”.
She loved the Italian people and culture, the celebration of food and she felt part of society. At the time she only had reasons to be grateful to life “but it was not a sweet nothingness”, she worked hard and loved what she did and in Italy she also met the man who would have later become her husband. He, German, brought an amiable diversion in her path and she passed from not knowing where life would have taken her, to start her career path in Germany thanks to the networking done by her Italian supervisor.
She worked as an engineer at the Barien Medical Systems for a year with accelerators for cancer treatment and chambers used for proton therapy, which she had to develop, dismantle, test and analyse. She then moved to Switzerland, and after a year of internship at Lucerne Hospital as a medical physicist where she worked in the field of photon therapy, a new path opened before her. She worked for several years in the company’s customer service department, at the help desk solving software management problems for customers throughout EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa and India) and travelled a lot to carry out trainings in more than 50 hospitals throughout Europe and beyond. Thanks to her work in the hospital, she was able to understand the problems of doctors and could finally benefit from her knowledge of six languages. In addition, being a migrant person gave her the advantage of understanding how other people think being able to help them more. According to Alejandra, a migrant person has to pay more attention in understanding the system, the language and it is stressful sometimes, but when you see that people around you cannot think outside the box, you realise that cultural diversity helps you.
“When you are born into a pool of silver, that’s all you see. While, if you haven’t had that kind of fortune, you understand much more the path one must take and how much it costs to get what you want”.
Subsequently, she was involved in the management of tenders for the acquisition of medical equipment by hospitals and doctors. She currently works in Germany at Siemens Healthineers as “Global Product Marketing Manager” for the image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT), an advanced and more precise technique. She deals with the product in a global manner and has to understand the technical and clinical capabilities on the one hand, and the appropriate marketing strategy on the other, and in this respect, she has also recently completed a master’s degree in ‘Brand Marketing Management’, which is very helpful in her work. When a product works, she wants people to know about it because that is the only way technology can move forward but, at the same time, she wonders how she can talk to people in countries like Bolivia about technologies to which they have limited access.
She currently lives in Forchheim, together with his family, and has a permit to stay that is directly dependent on the work she does, the ‘blue card’. This is granted to highly qualified workers and the company for which one works has to prove that it has looked for several German people and has found no one who could do her job. In her professional career, she has been involved in almost everything related to medical technology, from research, to the manufacturing process, installation and study of the product, to understanding it from the customer’s point of view.
“In short, I believe that for this reason there was no German who could do my job in the way I would do it. This mindset helped me”.
What she misses about Bolivia, apart from her family, is the spontaneity of people, improvisation, dancing and partying, two aspects that go together and are always part of the people’s way of life. Moreover, what she has always lacked in life is a female figure to look up that, like her, has decided to do science outside the country. That is why, when she returns to Bolivia, she wants to share her experiences especially with female students so that these can serve as an example. Being a physicist is still something exceptional in the country, and she wants to normalise the work, women’s roles and the versatility of the applications of physics.