Moving to Zurich was the second life-changing experience of my life, right after Novato. For the first time, I was truly by myself, in a new place where I basically didn't know anyone.
First impressions of ETH
My first impression of ETH was amazing! At Politecnico, I was one of a few really hardworking and ambitious people (at least among the ones I came across). At ETH, those few people from each university around the world had all come together — and were all living in the same little city.
Getting Covid for the second time delayed my move to Zurich, so I got there after the school year had already started, missing all the orientation sessions where many other students formed their first friendships.
"See you there!"
Feeling lonely and having difficulties finding friends, I decided to build — just like every other student moving to a new city does — a meeting app, together with my friend Luca [link to come], whom I had met at Politecnico and who was still living in Milan. This is how "See you there!" was born. Needless to say, the project didn't go anywhere, even though we learned a lot from it. Starting an app to meet random people was also not the best idea in the midst of a global pandemic. Anyway, it was a fun side project for my first couple of months in Zurich — and after three intense years of pure theory at Politecnico, I had finally come back to building things!
The soul-searching
As I started attending the neuromorphic engineering lectures, I began realizing that the field was still really nascent: even though the results were promising, it was still much more about science than engineering. More importantly, I realized the field was still far away from producing commercially viable products. This led me into a deep soul-searching that had begun, unconsciously, while still at Politecnico.
As a kid, I fell in love with electronics because it allowed me to get my hands dirty and build things I could feel and appreciate. But the more I advanced in my analog electronics studies, the more I realized that the job looked really far from what I had initially imagined. Instead of being in a workshop building things, I would have spent most of my time in front of a CAD software designing integrated circuits. The worst part was realizing that the space of possible things you can build in analog electronics is quite limited: filters, amplifiers, or sensors. Neuromorphic computing was the only option with a wider design space, but the fact that it was mostly science rather than engineering led me to question whether it was actually what I wanted to do. After all, I wanted to be an engineer, not a scientist.
Why software won
As my mind subconsciously moved away from electronics, I started realizing that with software the space of things you can build is more or less unlimited. Even more importantly, I noticed that the projects I was getting involved with were more and more about software, and less and less about hardware. Software had the fantastic property of making feedback loops nearly instant, which resonated with my desire to quickly build things and put them out into the world — by comparison, the long and delicate process of designing and manufacturing an integrated circuit felt eternal. Finally, with electronics I couldn't see how I would ever be able to start something on my own, given the huge resources needed just to get started. With software, I was just a few keystrokes away.
The switch
Luckily, ETH's master's in electrical engineering is an extremely broad program, allowing students to pursue anything from device physics to control theory and even pure computer science. Within a month from the start of my master's, I had dropped a few electronics courses in favor of some computer science ones.