Before the startups and the wandering, there was university. A Masters in Dresden, an exchange year in Boston, and a thesis written in Leuven. These are the artifacts.

Degree: Diplom-Wirtschaftsingenieur Halbleitertechnik — roughly ‘Master of Industrial Engineering & Management, specialising in Semiconductor Technology.’ There’s no clean English equivalent: it’s an engineering degree and a business administration degree fused into one, with no direct counterpart in the US or UK system.

Thesis: The thesis was about how to deliberately grow high-technology industry clusters — think Silicon Valley, but somewhere new. The fieldwork happened in Leuven, Belgium, which was building exactly such a cluster around IMEC, one of Europe’s leading semiconductor research institutes.

TU Dresden — Masters Diploma
Boston University — Exchange Certificate
Masters Thesis