I have been interested in electronics ever since I graduated from elementary school. I chose the technical high school to learn more about electronics. It was a five-year Electric Technical High School in Krakow (Poland). I learned about small signal analog electronics and about industrial electronics and electrical engineering. It was an interesting combination - usually people are either interested in small current circuits or about high current industrial electronics - I had a chance to learn about both of them. I have graduated first in class and first in school, which gave me the right to enter any technical university in Poland without an entrance exam. Since I have already had that right from winning Technical Knowledge National Championship, I have passed one to a colleague who was second in school. The subject of my diploma thesis was "Digital Stop-watch" (built on SSI and MSI TTL IC's).

My next school was University of Mining and Metallurgy (now AGH University of Science and Technology) in Krakow (Poland), Department of Electrical Engineering, Automatics and Electronics, major Electronics. It was the first school I have attended that was exactly in the direction that I have always wanted to learn about. Here are some details about my coursework. And here is the scanned copy of the translation of the transcript in MS Word file (2.3 MB download).

Usually during lab activities me and my friends from the same group, divided work between us. I have always chosen practical parts like connecting circuits, making things work. It required thinking, some practical skills and a little knowledge about what the lab was about, but it took much less time - my friends preferred to work less at the lab and work more at home, counting numbers and drawing charts.

I have spent the fifth (last) year at the university working on my diploma: The System of Processing and Loading of the Polish Speech Signal into Microprocessor - a system of fixed and adjusted filters for recognizing vowels by extracting and comparing main frequencies of their signal to the patterns. It was very ambitious subject and it took a lot of time, but it was very satisfying.

I got my Master's degree in June of 1985.