A typo on antagning.se led to Sandra Pantzare becoming a civil engineer. But aren't mistakes sometimes quite good? They take us forward in life and teach us a lot, even if it can feel hard at times. For Sandra, a mistake became a right, and with a degree from Linköping University, she got the opportunity to combine her greatest passion in life, horses, with her education. It even led to a job. Today, she works in a research project at RISE that aims to solve one of equestrian sports' biggest challenges, lameness. Join us and learn more!
Sandra describes herself as a “horse nerd and sports fan, who happened to end up on the technology track”. She comes from Gnarp, a small village in Hälsingland, and studied science at high school because she didn’t know what she wanted to be. After high school, she spent three years abroad. When the day came that she was ready to apply to university, a misprint on antagning.se meant that she ended up studying for a master’s degree in Electronic Design at Linköping University, in Norrköping.
“I had accommodation in Norrköping and didn't understand how carefully you had to rank your choices on antagning.se so I put the one that contained design at the top and got in.”. It was a tough and slightly confused start for Sandra. What had she done? Should she change? She says that the only relationship she had with electrical engineering was that her brother played games and changed circuit boards from time to time. “I had seen those green cards before, but that was all”". The community of the education and the challenge suited Sandra and after just a few weeks she was comfortable like a fish in water. According to Sandra, the education to become an engineer was even more enjoyable than her years in France and Australia after high school. Something she never would have dared to believe.
“Understanding electronics allowed me to come up with solutions to the problems I had around me, and when I understood what I could use my knowledge for, I was immediately hooked.”" she says. Sandra grew up with horses, in a large family, and during her senior year she came up with an idea that later became her thesis and is now something she is currently working on at RISE.
Read more: RISE is Sweden's research institute and innovation partner. In international collaboration with companies, academia and the public sector, RISE contributes to a competitive business sector and a sustainable society.
Sandra works with “Smarthorse Lab”. It is a research project where a system is being developed that will wirelessly measure forces under the horse’s hooves. The purpose of the system is to be able to follow the horse’s individual movement patterns and detect deviations that may indicate lameness at an early stage, and thus prevent more extensive injuries.
Lameness is one of the biggest problems in horses today and is both difficult to detect in time and to diagnose. Since horses are flight animals, they are experts at redistributing weight if it hurts somewhere, in order to be able to continue running. This often leads to the fact that before you can visually detect a change in the movement pattern, the horse has been walking with the primary injury for so long that it has incurred secondary injuries due to overload.
By measuring the forces under the horse's hooves, Smarthorse Lab hopes to be able to detect abnormalities in the primary injury at an early stage and thus be able to avoid secondary injuries by initiating rest and treatment immediately.
Follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarthorselab/
“I love this technology and the idea of using sensors to measure forces is of course not limited to horses.”" Sandra explains and says that she is in contact with other elite athletes. Football players, for example, want to find out how their feet and legs are affected when running on artificial turf compared to grass. "“The possibilities are endless.” says Sandra.
If she had met herself as a teenager, she would have told herself that she is technical. An anecdote from her childhood is when she was 8 years old and was playing with an excavator in the sandbox where the pedals had broken. Instead of asking anyone for help, she took out tools and tried to fix it herself. It ended up working out well and she remembers her mother exclaiming “Oh, did you do that? You’re so technical!”.
Today she understands how important it is to dare to tell girls that technology is not just about fixing things, but also about daring to break things.“You learn all the time by making mistakes and that's okay.”.
During the current pandemic, Sandra also wants to encourage the next generation of girls to strive in school. First and foremost, she just wants to confirm that it is It's tough to sit alone and study, without classmates and friends. She therefore advises going outside when the sun is shining or calling up some friends and studying together via FaceTime. Sandra is convinced that if you can study high school remotely, then you can pass any engineering program.
For us at Womengineer, Sandra is a living example of everything we stand for. That diversity is needed for us to create more innovations. According to her, the best thing about being an engineer is that you get the tools and the drive to change the world. “I had two skills, electrical engineering and knowledge of horses, that had never been matched before and it led to a thesis, research and permanent employment. Imagine how many more innovations could be created if other skills were matched!”.
Thank you Sandra for letting us interview you!
This interview was conducted by Emelie Emanuelsson, March 22, 2022.