How I became a techie: Serafin Diaz
How I became a techie | Tumblr
“Do what you like, enjoy what you do, and everything else becomes easier.” -Serafin Diaz
I grew up in La Paz, Baja, Mexico. When I was young, I was fascinated with magnets and had a collection of them. I used to destroy old speaker phones and pull the magnets out. I would tie them with small cords and suspend them, one after the other. I was very eager to see how they would repel out and float.
When my little brother, sister, and I reached a certain age, my father would ask other people to host us for a day or two. He would say, “You’re interested in that? Give it a try. Go and spend a week with your uncle, who’s a doctor, or this friend of mine, who’s an engineer.” That was very useful to me. In my case, because I was interested in math and computers, he asked a friend of his who had an electronics lab to host me for a week. That increased my appetite for engineering.
Growing up, I liked math quite a bit. I also liked physics, and both grew on me as I earned my bachelor’s degree. One day, I was working on control theory, writing equation after equation on paper. We didn’t have computer programs to do symbolic computations back then. At the end of the problem, I simplified everything into one nice equation. I looked at it and thought, “Huh! This is unstable! This thing oscillates!” That’s when I realized that I could see things moving in numbers and equations. You get so used to the math that you can actually see how numbers move.
Serafin Diaz is the vice president of engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, specializing in computer vision. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in electronic systems at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico. Diaz later got his Master’s degree in electronic engineering at Southern Methodist University and joined Qualcomm in 1997.
