From research to business #

Childhood #

When I was young and they asked me what do I want to be I said "I want to be an astronaut". Soon my dreams fell short, since my cousin came to me and told me I was too tall to be one. As child, having tall genes meant I was a head taller than all my classmates.

After crying a bit, I thought about it and change my dream into being a scientist. "I will be the one who will send astronauts to space." I thought to myself: "This will be even cooler, since the astronauts in the end are just the lab rats, scientists are those that are making in the end real decisions and discoveries.

I was a bit of a geeky kid growing up. I loved physics and mathematics, excelled at science competions, if I had a computer would probably spend my whole childhood there. However in retrospect, I am grateful for my parents pushing me to work on my athleticism through volleyball and gain an appreciation for music, through playing the trumpet.

Studying Physics #

At the time of choosing school I was indecisive between physics and computer science. Following the footsteps of my role model at the time Elon Musk.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

~ Elon Musk

I am increadibly grateful for the experience Physics has given me. There was met with an environment of people, who at the time seemed like geniouses. Being surrounded with a bunch of classmates, who all were previously at the top of their class, now being met with a reality check that there are people who are much smarter then them. There were no divisions between, people (you could even be a refridgereator and be respected) all that mattered was how smart you are (so smart smart refridgerator).

At the time I felt incredibly humbled and at times quite stupid. But after a while I learned maybe the most important lesson. That anyone can really learn anything. No matter what your background is. If people are smarter than you, I doesn't really mean much it just really means that they have a bunch of prerequisite knowledge that you don't really have yet.

• developed a growth mindset, you can learn anything, we are more similar than we think

Intelligence is elastic, if you put your mind into it you can learn anything

Studying Electronics and researching Robotics #

I switched my studies from Physics to Electronics, because one thing I really missed in the material I was learning was the practical application aspect of it.

Studying Electronics gave me also a bunch of free time, which I used to work part time as a robotics engineer in the Institute of Jozef Stefan. At the time they were working on a European funded project that aimed to move the progress of developing lower back exoskeletons. At the project I managed to created both the electronics and the machine learning algorithm that was used in predicting the motion of the human body. The exoskeleton that I worked on at the time was pretty simple in its workings. It was a passive exoskeleton, meaning that a levear had to be pulled when the human wearing it was bending down to pick something. By doing so the levear reduce the load on the back by 15%

Moving away from research #

Unfortunately after gaining experience from working in different research departments I have learned that research is a lot of times not so much about innovation and creating a great product, but more about writing papers. Also have learned that evenualy when funding dries up, such projects end up collecting dust.