Hi! Welcome and thank you for reading my most recent update. If you don’t know me, my name is Tobias, I’m an engineering student at the University of Waterloo interested in deeptech, robotics, and manufacturing. In this newsletter, I share what I’ve been building and doing as I work towards my goal of making an impact on the world of atoms.
Here’s what I’ll cover in this update:
My internship at Airthium
Lessons from travelling Europe
Since the beginning of the new year, I interned as a mechanical engineer at Airthium
Airthium is a cleantech startup headquartered in Paris. They are building the world’s first 250°C heat pump to decarbonize the industrial heat sector. That is, they are building a machine that makes it more profitable to operate high-temperature industrial processes using electricity instead of natural gas.
I learned a lot working there for four months. One of the things that made it a great learning ground was that I was able to touch all the stages of the engineering cycle: going from problem to basic concept in kinematic drawings, doing some physics and math to ensure the important criteria would be met (e.g. stress/strain), then CAD and finally manufacturing the parts, doing the assembly and testing.
Manufacturing using conventional machining was fun. I learned to weld and improved my skills on the lathe and the mill. I also gained more confidence in my ability to design a solution when handed a problem — it’s just a matter of reps.
An insight that I internalized from working at Airthium was that you can’t separate design from manufacturing. I’ve heard this cliché so many times, but it finally meant something to me when I saw how true it was firsthand. During my internship, I saw many examples of the tradeoff between ideal design and easy manufacturing/assembly. After this experience, it’s inconceivable for me to think of design in a black box, except for when brainstorming.
Overall, I left Airthium feeling grateful to get to do engineering as a job. You’re telling me I get to build the future… and get PAID for it? Sounds like a great deal to me.
I also made the most of the opportunity to travel while in France, which updated my perspective on school
I think I cracked the code for the best way to travel. For me, the goal of travel is not to sightsee, but to have a pragmatic software update of the self. This is achieved by leaving what you’re used to and throwing yourself into a new world, just to see if there’s anything from your former world that you’d prefer to remove, and if there’s anything from the new world that you’d like to take home.
The best way to travel is to live someone else’s life. Experiencing one aspect of another person’s life very intensely is much better than visiting all the landmarks in some city. Doing this gives you perspective on what assumptions you take for granted.
My favourite trip was a weekend I spent in Vienna. I visited my friend Gabriel, a music prodigy studying at the Viennese Music Conservatory. We’ve known each other since I was 12 from studying (and being rivals) at the same music school.
I loved this trip because I got to see the unfiltered life of a violinist, both the parts I loved and many of the parts I had—up until that point—forgotten about that made me fall out of favour with the music world years ago. I was so filled with adrenaline re-experiencing the parts I loved: the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, the desire for perfection and infallibility, the daily choice to sacrifice and suffer to reach the unreachable star. The obsessive, unrelenting, unforgiving, painful chase for glory. This is what I live for.
The combination of reading history and travel made me reflect a lot on spending my 20s in school
Out of all my smart friends, I’m probably the most pro-school person. I love to learn and the access to resources and network has already paid off a lot in my first year.
I did start to understand the downside of being in school in your 20s, however. This decade is not the one for you to cushion yourself. It’s the time to be bold and take risks; to throw your abundant will at the ideas that fire you up. It wasn’t so long ago that the world was a lot less prosperous and each individual had to fight hard to survive.
It’s a fact that we are capable of bearing the uncertainties, the discouragement, and the toil that we pretend are unbearable in our modern, privileged lives. We’ve evolved to be fearless at my age, so I should leverage that to the limit. I want to let knowledge enter my mind but create barriers to the osmosis of mindset.
Agency and ambition are still underrated
It’s easy to accept misconceptions that imply you don’t need to think as hard and don’t need to take as much action. It’s comforting to think that moving slower means being more intentional, or that the dots will magically connect themselves. These last four months reinforced my conviction in calling these ideas misconceptions.
The important questions don’t get answered “with time”. How am I going to build wealth, what types of people are still missing from my social group, and what is crucial for me to build? These are not questions for later. They must be answered now and the only way to get the answers is deliberate action.
The first third of 2024 reminded me that agency and ambition are underrated. Above all, I think the #1 action item for me is to take more risk. The threat of a consequence aligns all past learnings with the new goal.
Speaking of risk… some friends and I at Waterloo have been organizing a very ambitious hardware project that has sparked a fire in the community of our engineer friends. More on that next newsletter.
Thank you for reading and for all of your help. I’m always delighted to receive your replies. See you soon!
- Tobias
Extremely well written