The so-called "education"
Everything started in Rovereto, a little town next to the shores of Lake Garda, in the northern Italian Alps. You also may have noticed that the most beautiful things usually start in Italy, or in company of some whiskey, but this is a different story. Here in Rovereto is where my educational journey began. I attended Liceo Antonio Rosmini from roughly September 2009 until my graduation in a sunny and hot July of 2014. At my school we could choose whether to specialise in humanistic, scientific or linguistic subjects, somehow my parents peer-pressued me to follow a scientific path, but I cannot complain about that. My first couple of years went by in a non-particularly memorable way. However, starting from my third year I discovered my passion for physics and more generally numbers, shapes, symmetries and this was also thanks to my Physics Professor at the time, Professor Marco Chiocchetti. A true character, like most physicists these days one could think. By the way, if this story bores you (it sometimes even bores me to write it) you can have a summary of my education in the CV, although it won't have all the juicy details about my life of the lives of others in general. Anyhow, it came the time of the parents-teacher meetings, some people call them "conferences", some other "udienze". At these udienze Prof Chiocchetti formulated the hypothesis to my mother that I could be more naturally inclined towards purely scientific subjects in unversity such as mathematics or physics rather than jumping into medical school, which is so fashionable to do these days in Italy. I never liked fashion that much (this is actually a lie, but for this case it was true), but one thing I enjoyed was physics, so I went where life took me.
I always loved and will always love Italy, but not for its universities, I believe they are lacking quite a bit compared to the rest of Europe. Not so much in terms of academic preparation, but in terms of services or facilities or opportunities provided. Anyway, after touring around the UK to interview at different universities I decided to attend Imperial College London, in the homonymous city. I started my studies in a Bachelor Degree in Physics, but quickly changed to a Master in Theoretical Physics because I didn't enjoy labs too much. I wasn't born to measure currents and refractives indexes, or so I thought at the time. At university I truly devoted all of my time to stuyding and completing homework, I was extremely meticulous and diligent in preparing every exam and course to the best of my capabilities. I will always be grateful for those formative years, I don't think I would have the same motivation now to work on a problem set on Group Theory on Friday night right after coming back from swimming practice, but at the time I did. For good or for bad, possibly for both. The physics environment at Imperial was electric and sparkling, I felt like I could have pursued a career in many realms of physics. For a long time I was attracted to plasma physics, but then I was awarded an internship in South Korea at Seoul National Unviversity to work in particle physics at the Large Hadron Collider and this changed everything for me. The people I met here, for example Professor Hwidong Yoo or graduate student Kyongpil Li, truly impressed me, so knowledgeable but also so humble and always happy to help and explain all the crazy concepts from the internship. From machine learning using boosted decision trees and neural networks to the data structure used to store the experiment ntuples, they always had an answer for all my questions. Everything fascinated me and the kidness of my superiors won me over. I wanted to be part of that, so I did. The following term I started the final year of my master degree and as such I had to pick a project, for this I chose to work again at the Large Hadron Collider, this time joining the LHCb collaboration in search of lepton flavour violation in the production of b baryons. I must confess that my thesis advisor, whose name shall remain unknown, was not as impressive as Prof. Yoo, but I still managed to learn a good amount from the experience, mostly on how to solve problems on my own. Debugging we call it in the field, I think it's more like an art rather than picking bugs but I doubt that many people would agree with me.
Despite all the challenges, I was having a blast. So much that I decided to pursue a PhD in particle physics! This time life took me on the other side of the globe, all the way to California. Santa Barbara to be precise. I'm still in Santa Barbara as I type this text and google how to add hyperlinks in html... The things I learned throughout my PhD are truly numerous, and also better summarised in my CV, but if there is a single thing that I feel like mentioning then it would be the flexibility in learning new tools. The capability to do the most with as little information as one has it something that you don't see around too often, I belive it's a gift.
Continue...