For reasons I still don’t fully understand, my university went against good reason and granted me, a sophomore, $14,000 to build a balloon based sensor system for pesticide research. I am forever grateful to those unlucky administrators who put up with my dorm room laboratory, fielded calls from the FAA, and ignored the numerous tanks of helium stashed around the campus.

Known as ‘The Balloon Project’ my work was an engineering endeavor that took place on the newest university campus in California - which had no engineering program to speak of. With my small grant, support from a few incredible professors, the generosity of a local machine shop, and the Internet as my teacher, I designed and fabricated an air sampling system and accompanying subsystems that would soar to thousands of feet in the air to study the effects of pesticides in the atmosphere.

The gondola was laden with pan and tilt cameras, a full avionics suite, a remote deflation system, a WiFi enabled data logging system, 24 hours of battery life, a winching system, and all the accompanying software that made it work.

Two years of development later, with the official launch of the project looming, The Balloon Project beat California’s top-tier engineering universities in undergraduate research competitions taking home First Place in Engineering and Computer Science.

The most important thesis we proved: sometimes the simple act of supporting a student’s curiosity can be more beneficial than any classroom.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, is a rocket company with the audacious goal of bringing humans to Mars. However, before Elon can get us to Mars he needed to create a business that could build more reliable and less expensive rockets than anyone else.

Joining his team right after college as one of their youngest avionics systems engineers, my biggest contribution was the design of a small experimental satellite named K-SAT. My team spent nearly a year perfecting the design of a specialized satellite modem that when sent into space could send messages to Earth through the Iridium Satellite Network. The goal of this experiment was to determine if spacecraft could be controlled through pre-existing satellite networks which would save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in communications costs.

In 2007, K-SAT was loaded onto Flight 003 of the Falcon 1 rocket and, much to everyone’s dissatisfaction, blown up. K-SAT was rebuilt and in 2008 it caught the next flight into orbit where it successfully completed its mission.

My role was not limited to satellite design. I also was lucky enough to work on the thrust vector control systems, lithium polymer battery design, recovery systems, and payload interfacing.

K-SAT’s batteries are long since dead, but it’s still in orbit. Look up; it might be over your head right now.

My dad, the Chief Information Officer of a school, once brought home a broken VHS video camera for my nine-year-old self to dismember. As a child I gutted many a consumer product (often to my parent’s horror) but nothing dazzled me more than the optics, sensors, screens, and mechanical components that made that camera work.

After leaving SpaceX, I read about a filmmaker named Rob Spence who dreamed of filling his empty eye socket with a tiny video camera. He was asking the world for a little help, and so I wrote him something brief: “I’ll build that for you.”

Before you could say ‘Eyeborg’ I was whisked to Toronto to play my role as chief engineer. The first rough prototypes were built using borrowed equipment in Rob’s office-turned-laboratory. Every step of the process, success or failure, was captured by a cadre of filmmakers who would set up a three-camera shoot for even the most mundane of assembly jobs. I’m still waiting for the blooper reel to drop.

After a year of building a team, sourcing ultra tiny cameras, rice sized transmitters, batteries, and other various components – we did it. In 2010 Rob Spence became the first man to ever transmit video footage from the perspective of the human eye. The team took home one of TIME Magazine’s ‘Best Inventions’ for the year and our little project is forever ingrained in the pages of “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”

Learn more here: eyeborgproject.com

The Internet taught me nearly everything I know. It is the modern day equivalent of the library of Alexandria, except it’s much harder to burn to the ground. It is indispensible for realizing human rights, combating inequality, accelerating development, and quickening the pace of human progress.

It is the meeting place for humanity and a tool that helps people help themselves.

And for most of us, including you reading this right now, access isn’t considered much of a luxury. But, for billions of our fellow human beings, getting online is an impossibility.

A Human Right was founded in 2010 to accelerate universal connectivity with the belief that every person deserves the opportunity to get online. We launched a crowdfunding campaign in an attempt to buy a communications satellite from bankrupt company, changed the planned route of a transatlantic cable to connect one of the most isolated islands in the world, collaborated with documentary film makers to share stories of why the Internet matters, caused ruckuses at telecommunications conferences, and much, much more.

A Human Right was a finalist for the $1 Million 2013 TED Prize, works in partnership with the United Nations, and includes a bevy of incredibly dedicated advisors and team members from all walks of life – from astronauts to UN diplomats.

Learn more here: ahumanright.org