• Miquel Pastor, Telematics Engineering alumnus, systems engineer at Fortinet (Tokyo, Japan)

After earning his bachelor’s degree in Telematics Engineering from UPF in 2015, Miquel Pastor Sánchez and two friends from the university began to work on a very small computer security consultancy that had a few major clients at the national level, including some IBEX 35 companies, but a very small staff.

Over the years, this situation allowed him to gain considerable professional and technical experience, but there were few opportunities to evolve within the company. So, in 2018, he decided it was time for a change. ‘At the time, there were very few worthwhile job opportunities in Spain. Also, I had already been to Japan and had Japanese friends. So, I decided to go to there to work and, thus, to learn the language’, he explains.

Today he works for the company Fortinet, in Tokyo, where he is developing the infrastructure for the company’s cloud services for the Japanese market and, later, the southeast Asian market. He feels fulfilled in his current situation. ‘My goals are to be happy and to be satisfied with what I do and right now, in Japan, I feel like I am achieving all that. Nevertheless, if this feeling were to change at some point, and I had to move to another city or country or change jobs to find it again, I would do my best to make it happen.’

‘My goals are to be happy and to be satisfied with what I do and in Japan I am achieving that.’

He does not see himself returning to Catalonia. ‘Honestly, right now I would only go back home every two or three years on holiday and to see friends, but I don’t see myself working there. My current plans for the future are to stay in Japan and continue living here for a long time, but you can never be 100% sure about anything. You can always find projects that motivate you in other parts of the world.’

But what is it that Miquel likes so much about Japan? ‘The thing I like most about this country is that it offers me constant challenges, which is something hard to find. Each new day is different from the last’, he explains. Some of the things that he highlights are the language (‘one of the most complex to learn’), the culture (‘the differences in terms of everyday points of view are enormous’), and communication (‘people interact with each other very differently than they do in our country’).

Miquel has good memories from his time as a student at the university. ‘Sunny days in Plaça Gutenberg, shooting the breeze with friends, working on exercises in the library one or two days before the exams, or the occasional game of Counter Strike on Lan on the Tallers building computers. But my best memory of UPF is definitely when I met certain people who changed my life from that point on, people I still talk with and mutually appreciate today, despite all the distance between us.’

Photo gallery

Miquel Pastor in different places in Japan