This summer I stayed in Philadelphia to work on Nanoneuro full-time. It was one of the first times that I have moved out and worked on something independent, something that I have designed with my own hands.
Although I hoped to make substantial progress, it was actually much slower than I expected – in part because I underestimated how hard hardware truly is, but also because of how dependent we are on machinery if we don’t buy them and operate them ourselves. Some of the machines that we needed and were critical in the manufacturing and design process were broken for six weeks, which meant that a majority of the time I spent at Penn was not actually going towards the development of Nanoneuro. I was pretty bitter about it, but there is nothing I can do.
Instead, we have made as much progress as we could and now we are designing one of the first semiconductor chips in the world specifically tailored for biological substrates. Now that university has started up again, I’m now really questioning the value of my traditional education and whether I should pursue Nanoneuro full-time, as I’ve learned a lot in the little time I have spent over the summer working on it. I also think it’s enjoyable and fulfilling in my own way and it’s what I want to do in the future: do cool stuff and be highly technical.
