Interview date:
May 18, 2020
In this PreparationTech interview, Eliza Casapopol, an Artificial Intelligence Engineer based in Amsterdam, discusses how she discovered a love of math, science and technology and her mission to help kids from cities and villages in Romania do the same. She charts her path: from a child who participated in summer camps and math olympiads (competitions) to a student at Oxford University with fantastic female math professors to a professional who launched the Romanian Science Festival which provides informal learning and hands on experiments for kids.
"I don't think the math olympiads helped me as much as the summer school that I was talking about. That was actually a summer school...that's an international maths contest but it's not really math you learn in school. It's more like maths for fun. In Romania, it was gathering all of these very, very smart kids. And we've been there every years since I was 10, 12. Now I see I have a network of incredibly smart friends who are everywhere in the world that I've just managed to develop because of that summer school. That was luck for me but I would definitely encourage kids. If you feel like you like numbers, try such a competition and also try to go such a summer school. It's really, really valuable."
