Last Friday our headquarters were buzzing with high-schoolers from Petnica, the biggest Science Center in Southern Europe.
In the late sunny Friday afternoon, the porch in front of our HQ suddendly filled up with a huge bunch of youngsters. Like in some zombie apocalipse movie, they suddenly began walking towards the entrance.
I would have called the police and lock the doors immediately, if I didn't already knew that those were actually Petnica's most talented high-schoolers, paying a visit to our HQ, all organized by Marko Brežulj, head of Department of Applied Physics and Electronics (who's also a Microsoft employee).
Crowd of over 30 people filled the restaurant in a blink of an eye. We never had so many visitors since we moved in, so we didn't have a clue how to keep things in order. Fortunately, everything went perfect. We offered orange juices and water for refreshments, welcoming them for the first time. Many of them don't live in Belgrade, and they got here just to visit us. After all, this opportunity doesn't arrive very often.
The tour we took them on was thorough. We showed them each and every production process, carefully and slowly explaining each machine and the purpose of each tool. You could see in their eyes how interesting all of it was for them. When we opened the lid of a pick-and-place machine you could see ten kids putting their heads inside at the same time, curiously eyeing the top-notch technology.
I was also in Petnica when I was their age, although at the Department of Astrophysics, so I went back in my mind, remembering how excited I was when we payed a visit to local Astronomical Observatory. My heart was pounding all the way, and I felt so certain that I will one day work there, after I graduate astrophysics. Fortunately, my other passion were microcontrollers, and I ended up in the best company in the world - MikroElektronika.
As we moved from production to RnD section of the building, the excitement was booming up. They had a chance to take a look at our still unreleased projects, like Gesture click, Buggy and other I still can't talk about. Dragan from our Project Department, showed them a couple of demos. After five minutes we had to pull them out of his office, one by one, since they didn't want to leave.
After almost two hours touring the building, we ended up on our terrace, chatting about their future plans, answering interesting questions and exchanging E-mails. Of course, everybody wanted to take a picture and share on Facebook and Twitter. I sincerely hope someday, not to long from now, couple of those young people will become our employees, or at least establish a strong relationship to MikroElektronika when they become skillful programers in successful companies. According to what they told me, a lot of interesting projects will be popping out this year all done with MikroElektronika tools.
Yours sincerely,
Aleksandar Nikolic
MikroElektronika Marketing Manager