I get a lot of email from people asking to contribute to IEEE Spectrum. Usually, they want to write an article for us. But one bold query I received in January 2024 went much further: An undergraduate engineering student named Oluwatosin Kolade, from Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, volunteered to be our robotics editor. Kolade—Tosin to his friends—had been the newsletter editor for his IEEE student branch, but he’d never published an article professionally. His ear...
