Making Aerospace Accessible

I grew up liking science and technology. I did everything from playing with science kits, building simple electric circuits with leds and buzzers, making crystals from Aluminum Sulfate, and more... I also developed a love for mechanical systems by playing with lego or meccano. It truly showed the world of beautiful mechanical design to me. I never lost that passion when I became older.

Later I got into gaming and played clash of clans, fortnite, and minecraft. When I was 11 I wanted to buy a pc, I started searching the web but to my surprise a decent gaming pc was a bit too expensive for me. So I looked further and found out you could build a pc yourself. I watched many YouTube videos, blog posts, did a lot of searching, and let me older nephew check my choices. One day later I came to my parents with my proposal to buy all the parts and build it myself.

That got me into programming, learning a bit of python and javascript. Building my first website, back when you separated html, css and javascript into separate files. Then I found out about AI, machine learning and computer vision. I followed the free CS50 course, went through an astronomy university curriculum, and watch a lot of stuff on YouTube and Curiosity Stream. Those Curiosity Stream documentaries specifically really made and impact and the first time the universe blew my mind. This did instilled some fear/crisis in me. What I was starting to get a grasp of was just way bigger than myself.

I had never felt those feeling before. While I thought I would be useless in life, I did understand my human nature and that I have objectives to fulfill like starting a family, inspiring others and building cool stuff. Satisfy my monkey brain you know...

I've always loved building stuff with a specific interest in space, so with that vision I came to "Technical University of Delft". I wanted to be engaged by the lectures, the people I met, and the student teams. But unfortunately my expectations where too high, and I did not see that fast-paced environment I was looking for. The professors didn't teach well enough, and didn't inspire me. One of my courses was called "project" where I expected to build stuff, and do some practical stuff, but I quickly found out we wouldn't really build stuff, it was just technical writing and literature study. I quickly fell into a depressive state where literally for the first time in my life, I wasn't so excited to wake up and start my day.

Luckily, around the same time I started working on a new side project. AeroVia, an online platform to make aerospace more accessible to the world. I quickly found myself working on this full-time, not going to lectures anymore. It reignited my passion again and I couldn't stop thinking about it 24/7. What new features could I add? How can I improve the user experience? What new software do I need to use? The goal is to make aerospace more accessible, because rightnow you either go to university or you got to find the resources to learn it yourself. I want to fix that, and give everyone the tools to do it.

I've decided to drop out of university and pursue this mission.