From across the pond: A Khanversation with Robert Kruszewski, SW Dev intern
This Khanversation features software dev intern Robert Kruszewski, a native of Poland and currently a student at Imperial College in London. Although Robert is an avid ballroom dancer, a former intern at Morgan Stanley, and is a winner of the G-RESEARCH prize, we best know him as the guy around the office with the best collection of eye-catching shorts.
Tell us about your background:
I am from Poland and my family lives in the suburbs of Warsaw. I went to primary school in the area, but commuted 1.5 hours daily to my secondary and high school in the centre of Warsaw. I didn't do it because I liked it, I did it because my secondary school was, for the lack of better word, special and I desperately wanted to attend it. The school differed from any other due to the fact that it followed a democratic process. We had a governance model based on trias politica with a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary branches. Each of them comprised of students, teachers and parents. This school believed that for kids to develop all of the parties have to be equally involved. To my current surprise the system worked, and did so incredibly well. The place was a meeting ground for individuals and everyone was treated with respect. For my high school I decided to pursue International Baccalaureate (at the Ingmar Bergman IB World School in Poland) instead of the conventional Polish system.
I was surprised how remarkably similar the environment of my high school resembled the organization of a well respected university.
Now enrolled at Imperial College, I have currently finished my 3rd year of a 4 year Masters course in Computer Science.
How did you start programming?
I started learning how to program because I wanted to create things. It gave me possibility to solve problems that I had at that time. But I was not passionate about it. In fact I only did it because it was accessible. I would have loved to do molecular biology but that was a bit out of reach.
I have not undergone any structured computer science education before starting university and I only toyed with it. But as it turns out my toying was quite advanced.
First thing that I consider my creation was a tool to game our English teacher at the homework she gave us. If you have ever learned a foreign language you would realise there are a lot of words to learn. We had been given batches of them which were tested, every single one of them. Hence, instead of looking up the word in the dictionary I wrote a program that effectively reverse engineered popular English dictionaries (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Dictionary.com) and found definitions with examples for all the words assigned. It was rather successful for a while within group of my friends. However, I quickly learned that my approach was not sustainable. Only 3 years later during 2nd year of my CS course I realised how I could have done it better.
What are your thoughts about your Khan Academy internship thus far?
So far Khan Academy has been a great place to work. I have to confess that the experience surpassed all of my expectations. I especially like the fact that there is no patronizing of interns. In fact they get as much responsibility as anyone else.
What were your 2 truths and a lie?
It is exciting how on your first day you get to present in front of the company 2 truths about yourself and a lie and the everyone else's goal is to guess the lie. It would be hilarious to hear those for the people who joined before you. I guess nothing can be perfect.
When I introduced myself, I said that...
1) I do ballroom dancing
2) I have started at my university 2 years ago. It was mainly an exercise in self confidence. Turned out to be so much more. Needless to say I got so involved that I will be running the society in the following academic year.
3) Dancing aside, I have also said that I have been to South America and taken part in a car accident.