Initiated in 2020, an adventurous journey of the ETH Zurich student initiative Swissloop Tunneling has begun. They decided to contribute to significant innovation in tunneling by self-developing their own tunnel boring machine.

Participating at the Not-a-Boring Competition 2024 in Texas (USA), Swissloop Tunneling finds itself in an innovation-driven environment together with like-minded tunnellers from all over the world. Completing a one-year season of final mechanic optimizations, the team now has the chance to fully prove the successful outcome of their invested efforts.

Nonetheless, a project’s success in challenging the status quo of conventional technology never goes without having people’s passion to implement change.

Eugenio Valli, president of Swissloop Tunneling, is looking back on a variety of valuable experiences he and his teammates made.                                                                                                                                

As an aspiring engineer, you gain practical experience at Swissloop Tunneling from early on. Indeed, you directly start implementing what you learn at ETH and work on a project of high commercial potential.

All the team members have capitalized a lot on the curriculum at ETH Zurich to face any challenge. Academically enriched with the skill of well-structured problem-solving, you develop an attitude of facing a task no matter how difficult it gets.

One of the most challenging aspects of an initiative such as Swissloop Tunneling is communication. Indeed, it is crucial to have an environment in which all the participants work unified and solution-oriented on the commonly agreed objectives. However, being able to improvise is of great importance as well – as problems can always arise unexpectedly in engineering. The ETH students’ creativity and proactive attitude to approach a problem, helped Swissloop Tunneling a lot in that regard. However, this student project also influences the perception of working as an engineer. As opposed to the perception one may have prior to his/her studies, the early practical experience proves that engineering work is very diverse, ranging from concept development to hands-on implementation and organizational management. Swissloop Tunneling also gives the opportunity for members to prepare themselves for their professional future by getting involved in the exchange and collaboration with industry partners as well as students from all over the world. At this moment you realize that engineering is not an isolated activity. On the contrary, as an engineer with academic background at the ETH Zurich, you have knowledge and talent in various regards to create valuable solutions for people all over the globe in a complex and dynamically changing world.