Csanad Egervari
Welcome back to "My Week in ESTEEM" where students reflect upon their experiences in our program. This week's blog is brought to us by Csanad Egervari who is from Budapest, Hungary. Prior to joining ESTEEM, Csanad attended Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Budapest receiving both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering.
This was an average week - there were a lot of things to do. However, I met three wonderful people -- Flip Flippen, Will McLeod, and Father Anzelm -- during the week -- who I won't forget in my life.
On Monday I printed out and turned in my thesis paper, because it was 10 days prior my thesis defense. Since Yerlan has defense on the same day as mine, we went to the library to print out our magnificent masterpieces. After printing the papers, we put them in binders and split the submission work. Yerlan brought one copy of each thesis papers to Sam Miller, while I left another copy to David Murphy’s office.
At the Leadership class, we had the chance to listen a fantastic lecture presented by Flip Flippen, who was our virtual guest speaker on that day. Flip is a serial social entrepreneur, a remarkable person, a fantastic leader, and an excellent public speaker. Everyone enjoyed his talk very much. He shared amazing stories with us, which helped us to learn a lot about how an effective leader should behave in different situations. One key take-away message was the “CODES”, which is Confidence, Ownership, Drive, Empathy, and Self-control. These five attributes are common to some extent for every successful leader.
After classes, I headed with Yerlan to the library to finish the project for our tech elective class - Computer Vision. The rest of the week passed quickly due to a large amount of work. On Friday morning Yerlan and I showed our real-time hand gesture recognizer system to Professor Adam Czajka, who was contented with our project.
After the class we went to the Innovation Park, where Will McLeod, who is a former ESTEEM student, gave us a very enlightening presentation and shared his entrepreneurial experiences. His thesis project was SmarterShade, which is a cool new approach for window shading. Currently he is the co-founder of Keen Home Inc., which develops and manufactures smart vents. His insightful and immersive talk was about pitching, negotiating with investors, and his company’s experience with Shark Tank. I had to sneak out from the presentation a little before the end due to a call with a patent attorney, who would clarify some questions related to a protection of the Intellectual Property for Bionic Eyeglass - my thesis project.
In the evening, Flora and I had a unique opportunity to have a dinner with David Murphy and Father Anzelm, who is a president of the Pazmany Peter Catholic University. We had never had the chance to meet Father Anzelm before in person. He shared with us his adventures in the Middle East. Meanwhile, we talked about our thesis projects and future plans, as well as about Bionics Innovation Center, which is under construction in Budapest, Hungary. This facility will help commercialize the intellectual property developed at my university.
After the dinner, Flora went to the French Ball and I went home to catch up with sleep. Over the weekend I was working on my presentation for the thesis defense and on several projects I had for other classes. It is hard to imagine that very soon everyone in the ESTEEM class will be done with the thesis defense, and we are all graduating in less than a month.