2025-09-25: Her personality makes it seem uncomplicated, almost self-evident, yet both her studies and the career that followed are immensely impressive.
This week, Chalmers is for the first time organising an Alumni Day, inviting all former students to return to their old university. In connection with this, an exhibition is also being inaugurated – initially displayed in Chalmers’ main entrance – about Vera Sandberg, one of our foremost alumni to date.
A driving force behind the exhibition has been another Chalmers alumnus, the telecommunications veteran Bo Hedfors, together with Vera’s granddaughter Gunilla Resare, who has also written a fine book about her grandmother (Vera Sandberg – Sveriges första kvinnliga ingenjör, 2022).
It is a fascinating life story about a girl who grew up in a large family in Småland, but also about a very resourceful mother who was widowed and took over the family paper mill, running it together with her children. It is quite clear that this background was what led Vera Sandberg to decide to become an engineer.
So far, the story may appear both logical and reasonable. If it were not for the very fact that no one had ever done this before. After preparatory schooling at a practical secondary school, she was admitted to Chalmers by special dispensation, through a separate entrance examination in mathematics. The year was 1914, and she was 19 years old. The only woman among nearly 500 engineering students.
It could hardly go unnoticed. The student magazine Rasp published a cartoon in which people (men) walked straight into lamp posts because they could not take their eyes off this sensation, the first woman in a Chalmers cap. She is said to have been both nervous and a little uncomfortable with that cap – and the great attention probably did not make things easier – but before long she seems to have settled in.
The photographs of Vera with her circle of friends and in the Chalmers procession speak volumes: she enjoyed herself. And her studies went excellently, even though she herself described it as “certainly no bed of roses but rather a few years full of relentless work.”
Chalmers was a demanding education even then. But Vera Sandberg had what it took, something she also seems to have had a secure sense of herself. A few years after her studies, in an article reflecting on women’s professions and their prospects, she observed that women “must work clearly and with determination and thereby convince the world that, strictly speaking, when it comes to work it does not depend on the skirt but on working capacity.”
Her own working capacity was, as mentioned, beyond question, and during her career she held a number of highly qualified positions as a chemist and laboratory head in Swedish industry at the time: AB Skandinaviska Affineriet in Partille, Reymersholm’s Oil and Feed Factory in Karlshamn, Helsingborg Rubber Factory, and Sieverts Kabelverk.
She ended her professional career in 1937 when she married, devoting herself fully to her husband’s five sons and their upbringing and education. It may sound strange today, when a life as a housewife feels foreign to most, but she herself does not seem to have regarded it that way at all. Moreover, she remained engaged in the family paper mill, and through wise management of her own assets she lived financially independent after her husband passed away in 1950.
She also remained engaged in technology and science throughout her life as a member of the Swedish Society of Engineers and participated with great joy in reunions with her former classmates from Chalmers.
To me, Vera Sandberg represents much of the very finest of Chalmers: the love of science, the joy of friendship, and perhaps most of all – the fact that technical education changes the world for the better. It is a life’s work that continues to inspire.
Martin Nilsson Jacobi, President and CEO of Chalmers University of Technology
Under the headline "President’s perspective" the President and CEO for Chalmers University of Technology, shares his reflections on current topics that concern education, research and utilisation.