Question: How did you know what type of engineering you wanted to go into

Pawel Rulikowski answered on 10 Nov 2021:

Hi Ella,
I think I was always fascinated by how things work. Electronic engineering can be enjoyed easily at home as a hobby (nowadays possibilities are almost limitless with all those programming kits likie Arduino, microbit, RaspberryPi etc.). it is a bit like magic taking a few parts and seeing them to do something useful like remotely switching light. When I was growing up in the 1980s world was quite a different place. The most advanced piece of electronics that people had in their homes was TV (and actually it is quite complicated piece of engineering!) so if you wanted something unusual you had to build it yourself. At the beginning I was more interested in digital design – think computers but later analog circuits were more interesting to me (in fact digital circuits are just specialized analog circuits) and often regarded as “black art” – sort of magic. Radio frequency (RF) circuits are another more complicated class of analog circuits – “the blackest of black arts”. Many additional problems have to be taken into account when working with such things, also RF circuits are close to physics and electromagnetic waves and interests me very much. I am training professionally in electronics from the age of 15 when I started a tachnical college in Poland – type of secondary school where you learn a particular profession for 5 years and you finish with a title of technician and a leaving certificate. this was very good school where quite few practicing engineers had classes with us.