Blog it forward – Michal Korzen

This blog post is a part of the “Blog It Forward” challenge. At the beginning, I would like to thank Vitaliy Rudnytskiy who blogged it forward to me, and successfully managed to convince me to write.

Who I am and what I do

My name is Michal Korzen, and I am currently both an associate consultant, Data Science team member at SAP Poland and a dual-enrolled student. Since my experience at the age of 23 is still limited, let me start my story with my short history.

Short Bio

As a little child, I loved to paint and create. Hardly anyone knows, that Polish Post issued a postage stamp with one of my “paintings” on it in over a million copies ;-). However, pretty soon I’ve changed the sector of my operation to science. As universities’ doors become widely opened for me, I decided in 2011 to start studying Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science of Warsaw University of Technology. A few months later I started my second field of study – Management (with specialization in Project Management) at Warsaw School of Economics. Every success has always been possible thanks to great people on my way – my parents, teachers, friends and fellow workers, who have always been opened to my questions, ideas and let me to find my own path and make decisions on my own.

Me @ SAP

Everything was going smoothly, so the time has come to take on a new challenge. Therefore, one sunny afternoon last summer I sent my application to local SAP’s HR department. I didn’t have to long to wait as just a few hours later in the midnight I got a response and quite soon I signed my first contract and luckily joined the consulting NW/BOBJ/HANA team led by Tomasz Sawczuk. I spent my first three months working with HANA appliance given solely to me. I’ve devoured tens of thousands of pages of SAP’s guides, references and courses, gone over numerous test paths and configuration settings run on the live system and sent endless messages with questions to learn as much as possible and understand in-memory computing in details. As you can imagine, there were days I had to restore or even reinstall HANA not only once a day… 😉 Fortunately, my efforts have been awarded as I’ve already succeeded in passing HANA certificates.

For almost six months now I’ve had pleasure to be part of the Data Science team, working with Karol Dworak, Piotr Cogiel, Elżbieta Derecka, Tomasz Nycz and Monika Nycz on Proof of Concepts (PoCs). Together, we’re trying now to push back the frontiers, make the impossible possible powered by SAP HANA.

Q&A

How did you start with computers?

Actually, as far as my memory goes, however I got my first own PC at the age of 7. Inside there was powerful at that time 366MHz Celeron. After a few months,  I got bored of games and started to provide changes in found configuration files – a few times it has gone wrong. Fortunately, at the age of 10 I realized that coding HTML & JavaScript bring much more fun.

How did you start with SAP technologies?

I first heard about SAP from my parents. That time, R/3 was for me a kind of mystery, magic box that gathers everything in one place. I got back to SAP two years ago as I met Vitaliy Rudnytskiy for the first time. He has inspired me to such an extent, that pretty soon I finished my first openSAP course by Thomas Jung. I still remain a big fan of MOOCs – (concerning SAP related content) so far I’ve finished 9 openSAP and  3 openHPI courses.

What do you do to relax and recharge yourself?

I love going to the mountains. I believe that following picture taken by me a few months ago and found on my company’s notebook explains everything… 😉

Blog It Forward:

I would like to blog it forward to the real young talents: Diana Mihaylova and Martin R. Hristov (SAP Labs Bulgaria), Jaroslaw Zdanowski (HICRON, Poland). I had a great pleasure to meet them at InnoJam @ CeBIT. Questions that I would like to pass to them are:

1. Tell us something we don’t know about you and also couldn’t have guessed.
2. Who inspires you? Why?
3. What do you enjoy most in your work and why?

Thanks for your time!

Michal