I Graduated with a PhD in Computer Science

I graduated with a PhD in Computer Science, specializing in Robotics.

That sentence is simple. Getting there was not. A doctorate is a long sequence of problems that refuse to behave: experiments that fail, systems that work everywhere except during a demonstration, and questions that become more complicated the closer you get to an answer. It taught me to stay curious when certainty disappeared and to keep moving when progress was measured in millimetres.

Robotics made that journey especially tangible. The field lives at the boundary between code and the physical world. A model can be elegant, but a robot still has to sense, decide, move, and recover when reality does something unexpected. Working at that boundary changed how I think about intelligence. It is not only prediction or computation. It is adaptation, embodiment, interaction, and the ability to act responsibly under uncertainty.

This degree also belongs, in part, to the people who helped me reach it: mentors who challenged my assumptions, collaborators who made the work stronger, friends and family who carried me through the difficult stretches, and students whose questions kept the work honest. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

Finishing the PhD is a milestone, but it does not feel like an ending. It feels like permission to ask better questions. I am leaving this chapter with more humility than I entered it, a deeper respect for hard problems, and an even stronger desire to build technology that expands what people can do.

Dr. Maz has a nice ring to it. Now, back to the work.