Nikola Tesla's Education

In elementary school, Nikola Tesla was one of the best students of his generation. Smart and hardworking by nature, learning came easily to him. He enjoyed studying.

In the gymnasium, which he studied in Karlovac and Gospić, he also showed excellent results in all subjects. However, at that time he was best at learning mathematics and drawing. In addition to graduating with a very good result, he acquired so much knowledge in important subjects at school that it was not at all difficult for him to enroll at the technical college in Graz, which at that time was considered one of the of the best educational institutions of its kind in Europe.

At the university in Graz, wide horizons of the world of electrical engineering open up before the young man from Smiljan, and he enters it full of joy and thirsty for knowledge. Tesla studies much, much more than all his colleagues. He uses every free moment to study. He studies at a grueling pace, up to twenty hours a day, and sleeps, as he will do later, only three to four hours. When he is not studying, he experiments in the school laboratory...

Such work brings him not only exceptional success in his studies but also the sympathy and favor of his professors. They encourage this humble young man, in whom they see a future genius, to work even harder and learn more than others.

However, like every young man, Tesla is eager to have fun. Although it seems incredible to us, he still finds time for leisure, which he usually seeks by reading fiction and poetry. He even discovers an inclination towards poetry and writing verses. Despite studying so much, how did he manage to find time for his small, human pleasures? Very simple. By nature, he was self-disciplined and rational, so he managed to plan the available time down to the last detail and use it to the maximum in the best possible way. According to this system of life in his youth, he will live in the same way later on.

He completed his education with great success at the University of Prague, which at that time was considered one of the best electrical engineering schools in the world. Another in a series of proofs of how much Tesla was a man of exceptional qualities.

For what he learned at that time, he owes gratitude primarily to himself, as he studied far more than his colleagues and peers, so that at the end of his education, he was more scientifically well-versed than them and ready to embark on the hidden and thorny paths of uncovering the secrets of nature.