In 2019, I was honoured by the outstanding journalist Zsuzsanna Dömös writing a portrait of me for Forbes Hungary. Many of my international friends asked for a translation - so, here it is. Thank you to Réka Turcsányi for the translation.

This work, it’s fulfilling

Written by: Zsuzsanna Dömös. Photo by: László Sebestyén.

Miklós Danka is not even thirty, yet he has been working for one of the most exciting Silicon Valley companies, Palantir Technologies, for seven years. Spies, the army, government bodies, and the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and energy industries are among his business partners, while he also teaches on a regular basis, at home and abroad. He has taken part in Hungarian politics too.

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The following is the English original of an article that has been published in Czech in the magazine of Psychology students at the Charles University in Prague (see the Czech version at the end of this post).

Photo by Vít Krištof

In September of 2009, I started my Computer Science studies at Cambridge in the UK. During one of our first courses I was astonished to learn that a majority of these smart, experienced, and well-selected students struggled grasping certain programming concepts. Recursion (some program code executing itself) stood out in particular as something that was crippling to others but felt natural to me. How could this be? I concluded that either I was an alien with a special brain (unlikely), or I had some prior experience that caused this difference (more likely). But what could it have been?

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My experience is mostly for Oxbridge and for Maths/Computer Science (and that's what I'm going to assume for the following tips), but the lessons below apply to other universities and courses too - adapt them to your personal taste and needs.

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The same article in Hungarian: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/fb/danka-miklos-egyetemvalasztas-maskent/

As always, what I describe is my mental model, and not “a universal truth”. There are implicit exceptions to everything I write. You can benefit most from it by open-mindedly considering my points and incorporating them into your mental model.

In a recent discussion with a young person who was facing a university choice I realised that our regular assessments are oriented around less important aspects.

Discussions around universities tend to be dominated by subject quality: which university is the best at teaching a given subject? For heavily knowledge-based subjects like Medicine, this might make sense. But for others - like Maths, Computer Science, Social Sciences, and so on - it does not.

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