I graduated from high school in Greece last year with a passion for Math, Informatics, and Astronomy, which I explored at an International Olympiad level. I love to spend my free time coding and building robots.
I decided to take a gap year because I wanted more time to explore and figure out my long-term goals. Right now, I'm studying at Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
I came across Non-Trivial through an Instagram ad. After graduating high school, I didn’t want to wait to have an impact and Non-Trivial was the perfect chance for me to get started. I also got excited about joining a community of like-minded people committed to tackling pressing world problems.
Panagiotis and team Greece at the Balkan Olympiad in Informatics, 2023.
Finding a solution to a pressing world problem, or even a new approach to it, is a difficult and scary process at first. I worked through Non-Trivial’s worksheets and identified a problem, AI safety, that is both important and fits my interests in coding and robotics. I then spent a week reading dozens of AI papers (and taking notes) and brainstorming lots of (bad) ideas. I settled on my final idea, got feedback, changed my idea again, and then started coding a prototype to test my main hypothesis. My prototype produced some interesting results, which I eventually self-published on arXiv.
The most important realisation I had during the fellowship was that people can change the world, particularly when working with other people. I learned a lot about problems in the world and ways to solve them. But more importantly, I got first-hand experience in the methods that people use to find those solutions and produce useful results. I also improved on my technical skills a lot during the course of my project, because I had to for my project to succeed.
Definitely coding the prototype. Because my idea was building on an existing approach, I needed to contact the author to get the code of that approach. He surprisingly was very supportive of my idea and willing to give me the code. It took a lot of time, but pouring over the code also taught me the most about the approach, the algorithms used, the mathematics behind it, as well as how and why it actually works. That process, however, was a demonstration that getting hands-on with an idea or a concept can teach you the most about it.
Participating in the fellowship greatly amplified my interest in solving important problems of the world or my community. That led to me catching every possible opportunity to pursue that, by becoming a volunteer in Greenpeace Greece, taking initiatives and leadership roles, participating in other programs related to tackling global problems or specifically tackling AI safety, and conducting research in scientific areas with important real-world applications. I became much more active than I was before, and started setting goals for myself and my future. I also got deeper into robotics, learned a lot of useful skills, algorithms, and frameworks that are used in the industry, but also the mathematical background that I needed to implement them on my own.
Focusing more on my long-term goals and taking the initiative to achieve them. Although I learned a lot from my olympiad and robotics experience, I think I could have started deeply engaging in the world and have an even greater impact. But that’s a goal that I have set for my future.
