3 years, 4 months ago-
Hello guys,
I hope you’re fine š
I agree with @silviag when she says failure is what keeps her alive and motivated. Failure is also what scares you, so it stimulates you to do your best! If you think you can’t fail, you risk settling for normalcy and mediocrity. Failure is always around the corner but I see it as something positive; there is a proverb that says:
“After a great climb there is a great descent”. .
So I think failure is part of the game.
In the last call I introduced myself saying “I think I’m the youngest member of this project” but I was wrong! I had just read @patrik, welcome!
This forum is very motivating, I love it!
Wow guys, I really appreciate your thoughtful answers!
I thank my colleague Daniel Romano, I’m gonna be the moderator of the forum for this week, animating the conversations between you: this doesn’t mean you are not allowed to propose a topic to discuss, on the contrary, it’s much appreciated!Ā
Few words about myself: I’m the Head of Growth of Milaner, an e-commerce startup based in San Francisco. I also consult a few Italian startups on themes like customer acquisition, advertising strategy, and business growth.
A computer engineer by training, I betrayed the numbers to pursue my interest in human psychology and what influence people in taking decisions (don’t be fooled, I still have an engineer’s mind!).
I took part to Silicon Valley Study Tour in 2017, guided last year’s edition, and lived in San Francisco for a while.I constantly search for new exciting projects to take part in, and it’s not strange to find me awake at night working on something new.
This brings us to the first topic I like to hear your opinions about: since you surely have many interests and ideas, how do you balance the desire to explore new things with the need to keep the quality of your work high (in general – be it studying, a job or a hobby)? Have you ever struggled with this or do you have your personal way to keep things balanced?Andrea – Forum Moderator
Good evening everyone!
Hi Andrea Parodi, nice to meet you! š
Nice question, I try to report here all the things I’ve been doing since I started working and attending the master’s degree, these have been helping me focus on my interests, work and studying.
- Organize my day with a to-do list: it makes realize how much I have to do and then I am more conscious about my goals of the day;
- Take a good quality pause: during my study’s pause, when at home, I always try to make me a good snack, or I usually workout. One of my recent hobbies is pilates, I have started practicing since the lockdown. It helps me free my mind and relax. Does anyone has already tried it?
- Read articles, papers about the courses I am studying, or everything I’m interested in. To go deeper into topics I always try to find some interesting articles, blogs, presentations to help me understand things a lot better, I usually share some of them on my Linkedin page;
- Wake up early while getting a good amount of sleep. I start working at the office by 9 am and I have to leave the house by 8.20. I wake up around 6-6:30 to get a good breakfast and focus on a small university task. To do so, I go to bed early, around 10:30-11 pm if I don’t hang out with friends.
- Study and confront friends: since the start of the master’s degree, I have been studying more with my colleagues. This helps me get a 360 degrees overview of the subject because often everyone learns a slightly different aspect of a topic. Talking together makes you understand the topic more deeply, focusing on things you have considered not useful.
I can’t wait to read all of your answers!
Silvia
Hi everyone,
Iām Francesco Pasqualini, Iām 22 and Iām from Verona.
Iām attending the third year of Bachelorās degree in Computer Science at āUniversitaā di Trentoā.
My biggest passion includes cyber and physical security but Iām also passionate about Finance, investments and trading .
I also love to think about new ideas and Iām looking for to create a startup and start a new businesses.
One year ago, at the university I meet a guy that asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him and his idea and create a startup.
I was really excited about it but unfortunately, in that period I started to work to a research foundation as developer and we had not much time to create the startup.
That guy became a close friend and now we share our ideas and we estimate the feasibility of them.
Last month, that friend told me about SVST and I joined this community.
Iām really interested in expanding my network and to put myself in the middle of the game.
āI don’t copy style, I make itā
Hello everyone!
@parroĀ I think that balancing our aims with the quality of our activities is essential to not waste time and do everything properly. I like to do things at my best and not realize a lousy solution.To do this, I consider everything I have and I want to do asĀ objectivesĀ from the pages I would like to study per day to the organization of an entire work group or a project. Each time I reach them I am ready to set myself other goals in order to reach something more.
I can share @silviag attitude. Sleeping is restorative. Furthermore I must admit that sometimes my purposes let me awake and so I keep on making plans. And taking the time for a break helps us collect the energy to start working again.
In addition, not being anxious is so important to be focused. Through the time I’ve been “studying myself” in order to use feelings in a proper way and avoid making them influence my work in a negative way. So being balanced with our own personality is even a step in organizing our projects and reaching our aims.
Finally, having a good background is a good point. I mean, we should always know what we are doing and the consequences it may concern. We must be conscientious. This quote of the tennist Arthur Ashe helps me explaining my idea: “One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” We never end studying and we may never think the opposite otherwise we will stop our brain. We must be hungry of knowledge and so I am. I am fascinated by discovering new things coming from all the kind of fields. We must know who we are because we are those responsible for our work and we are the only ones that have to act if we want to reach our aims.
We have to to use everything we have to keep on doing and not wait for others’ agreement.
I wish you all a good day!
Daria Arena.
Hi guys!
I was reading some of your posts!
I agree with most of you who say that we must use all the resources we have to reach our dreams.
I also think that our attitude to work make the difference.
What you think about?
Hello everyone,
I am Marco Lapolla, I live in Genoa and I am 24.
Currently, I am attending the second year of the Master Degree in Robotics Engineering at the University of Genoa. I attended a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science Engineering also in Genoa.
Moreover, I am attending the ISSUGE program (parallel courses mostly focused on economics, teamwork and new technologies).
At the moment, I am developing my master thesis work in virtual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping for Martian Rover in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space.
I also founded with other 10 students an association called ISA with students and alumni from the ISSUGE course. For now, we organized events and webinars on different multi-disciplinary topics. Today, we are almost 200 people.
I thought SVST would be a great opportunity for my future carrier, since I want to work abroad and the Silicon Valley is a very good possibility for a roboticist.
Good evening to everybody!
Hello!
My name is Sofia Di Giorgio,
Iām 22, but Iāve lived two years in Stockholm, where Iāve had several jobs. I am currently a first year student of Medicine and Surgery at Humanitas University, and Biomedical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. It’s a double degree program called Medtec held in English. The thought is that Physicians, Surgeons and Researches should also acquire technological and engineering knowledge, not only scientific.I followed Lara’s webinar and it was really interesting to understand how important a transdisciplinary background is!
Silicon Valley is a place where new technologies are born, and where startups that embody what I am interested in are: the bridge between medicine and technology. This is why I am attracted by the idea to follow and learn how people in Silicon Valley think and act.
Hi everybody!
My name is Michele Saladino and you’ve probably seen me opening or closing the LIVE streamings of the “Go to Silicon Valley Virtually” tour.I’m actually a 20-years-old content creator in love for everything which is in the creative and digital field.
My age may trick you but I’ve actually developed a pretty long CV in the last few years. I started my “career” during my second year of High School as an amateur photographer, this passion evolved into videography and later in an internship where I learned more about web designing and graphics.
During my fourth year of High School I moved over to Scotland where I founded my first online community, a group of exchange students dislocated everywhere on the globe and sharing their experiences to help future Exchange Students. We collected a pretty high number of experiences and members and we started to expand thanks to the paid partnership with a multinational company supporting the project.
This experience ended for me after 2 years of working for this company. I had the incredible opportunity to talk with thousands of students traveling through Italy and the whole Europe with different job titles.
I learned a lot from that and it took me to my dad’s startup which needed someone like me to develop some new projects. We worked together planning a futuristic event in Milan for almost 9 months but everything was ruined by the upcoming COVID emergency. As the quarantine started we founded “Rinascita Digitale” which is now a full time learning platform where we produced more than 450h of LIVE lessons with more than 600 guests and 25k subscribers.
Next year I’m probably moving back to the UK where I got into some universities and I’m planning to live for the next 4 years of my life, let’s see where this will take me!
In the mean time I’m constantly searching for new ideas and collaborations, don’t be shy, feel free to keep in touch with me in or outside this forum.
See you soon
MicheleGood evening!
I am new here and I saw an interesting question on the forum. How do we manage to split our time between activities and studies.
Itās an interesting question to address, even more after I followed the chat with Lara this afternoon. She said that itās important to have other activities beyond the University. I have recently applied for a project, actually a bunch of projects, all about how to diagnose cancer with algorithms and machine learning. I often struggle to use my time wisely and honestly I was a bit scared to begin this new project. Although I think it will really help me to deepen my understanding in what I can do with the hard-skills I am going to acquire during these six years. I believe that organisation and goals are at the base of success. I have finally bought an agenda and I try to organise my days by setting manageable goals.
How do you do to use your time at best?
Iād also like to address a further question that came up to my mind during the Webinar.Ā Do you think that an early experience abroad has a different impact on the person you are, with respect to an experience at an older age?
Sofia.
Thanks Lara for the webinar today. The projects you exposed today were so awesome. It’s amazing to know you have studied philosophy and now you are a computational linguist at Google, two very different fields. One different field I want to learn aside from my university’s studies is psychology. It’s really interesting how you can understand the mind and all the actions we do.
Hi Sofia Di Giorgio! I’ve heard about this new degree in Milan, I found it so interesting. Could you tell us more about it? What courses are you attending right now? Isn’t it the first year the degree is available? Also, can you share with us the projects you have applied to? Machine learning applications in medicine fascinate me, I’m currently studying Data science and engineering and I would like to work in the bioinformatics field one day!
About the question you proposed, I haven’t got yet the opportunity to work abroad but I think it’s a good way to broaden the horizons, especially now that we’re young. Furthermore, I have attended one study week in a high school in the UK four years ago during the last year of Liceo Scientifico. It was a great opportunity to live with an English family and get to know their habits. Of course, it impacted my life a little, even it was for a week.
Silvia
Hello everyone!
Today talk was awesome, mostly because Lara’s age is really close to us and her career wasn’t still so long and successful like the previous speakers which made her a little closer to our world.
Regarding @parro question: for my point of view, was always “simple”. The only limit for me is the 24h length of the day 8h of which require me to sleep. My “strategy” is “everything in its own time”.
I generally don’t schedule my commitments on a week basis but on an accademic year basis. With this I can see over the year the periods where I’m just concentrated in studying and the ones where I totally free (lesson suspended after exams) or almost free (when I have lessons but it’s not necessary to study since exams are too far).
The only constraints I have are: priority to the university and all exams passed on the first call. I generally need 2 weeks per week for each subject and that means that 4 months per year I’m busy in studying. This leaves a lot of room.
Summer is completely free and 3 weeks after the winter call exams are again free. The rest of the year is partially busy with lessons.Everything I want to accomplish, try, investigate, deepen or understand I do it during the time I don’t have to study or follow lessons.
I found it really powerful because in this way you can plan in the long term, even on more years (I remember me doing this when I was at the second year of university). And I didn’t struggle at all to get results. Exams grade are still good enough (average upper that 25), while at the same time I grow more than I would just by focusing entirely on university.
Sometimes I found myself even working in the evening on some project or technology, but that’s completely ok. If I’m working, I’m growing. If I’m growing, I’m happy!
Guys, I really appreciate your contribution to the discussion!
If you are interested in the topic of “balance between life’s aspects” I strongly suggest the book “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown (https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown/dp/0804137382).
You can listen to a brief but interesting interview with the author here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsFefdPhL3w&t=51s (many insights on this topic and more!)Moving on, I think @sofia ‘s question is worth some discussion. I repeat it here:
“Do you think that an early experience abroad has a different impact on the person you are, with respect to experience at an older age?”Looking forward to hearing your ideas š
(maybe stimulated by Lara’s speech during the webinar)Andrea – forum moderator
Hello guys!
The latest webinar left me speechless.
I revised myself a lot.
I have had and have also now uncertainties about the future.
Maybe I still don’t have the ability to frame myself in a specific area … however I am sure of one thing: trying to pigeonhole in a specific category doesn’t make sense.
Being young also implies these things: uncertainty, fear, feeling out of place, wanting to be everything and nothing at the same time.I have always wanted to go to Silicon Valley, to savor a pinch of that resourcefulness that I am still cultivating; also I would like to see with my own eyes people smiling when he leaves work, satisfied with his work and his life.
See you soon!
Hi Everyone š
Todayās webinar was really interesting, I really liked it when it was said “if you have to do something you donāt have to do it for the money but for the passion you feed”
unfortunately, Iām meeting many guys who instead want to open a startup exclusively for money… I would like to know what you others think about it.
Hi @sofia, it seems a very interesting project and an opportunity not to be missed using machine learning to diagnose cancer.
My advice is to dedicate some time to how to organize your projects, having bought an agenda is definitely a very useful way to get things more tidy.
For example, it helps me a lot to use a blackboard where I mark the notes and the most upcoming events, you have a lot of space and the possibility of making schemes and writing algorithms.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” (Theodore Roosevelt)
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