My education as an international student with a very diverse experience of applying knowledge has taught me the vital diversity of points of view, the value of focus, as well as the power of cooperation. Having experienced two forced relocations to Eastern Europe before my teenage years – including 18 months as a real self–taught – I arrived in the UK at the age of 14, at that time I had absolutely no contacts in the environment in which I found myself. Mastering a new language and a completely different education system in some of my teenage formative periods was extremely difficult.
At first, I decided to plunge into my independent engineering solutions, spending hours in my room conceptualizing, planning and developing a series of design projects in the field of electrical engineering and computer science, which stimulated me and filled my life with meaning. The pure excitement and intellectual curiosity aroused by these projects is still alive in me to this day.
I started with small projects that gradually became more complex and ambitious. One of them was a coin counter that displayed the total value of the stored coins. A more complex example was a smart chessboard that I designed and built under the supervision of Columbia University professor Ioannis Kimissis.