5 years, 6 months ago-
Hello Guys!!
I’m Stefania and I’m a student of Innovation Management at the University of Trento, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.
I did the tour in August and was one of the most exciting experiences of my life! I can’t wait to share with you my experience and to give you some tips and tricks about San Francisco and the Silicon Valley!But now it’s your time.. let’s start!
Here we have an article about diversity.. but there are also other topics that you can use to tell us something interesting! Like education, internet access and also what the Government do to foster the job demand..
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/silicon-valleys-top-firms-are-embracing-diversity
Read it and share with us your ideas! But don’t forget to introduce yourself!
I hope to hear something from you!
Dear Stefania,
thank you for the tips and suggestions you gave me by sharing this article.
I’m going to take a few lines to introduce myself with the aim of explaining my point of view better, starting from my background.
I am Enrico and I am a student of Economy & management at UniPD and of course I hope to be part of the Silicon Valley Tour 2018.
As I told I am a student, but during my university career I had the opportunity to work in the biggest Italian Wine group, Zonin 1821, where my task included developing innovative programs and manage the relations with the export markets we served with our products around the world. Before that experience, I fell in love with H-farm and I participated in H-ack Fashion organized at the Farm. After the event, my team and I developed our project, together with the firm involved in the hackaton. We developed an innovative platform, a sort of social network that connects designers, graphics and firms with a lot of potential to increase the awareness of each participant as well as personal earnings.
I found you thanks to a word of mouth and I didn’t resist to send to you and Paolo some emails because I’ve a strong motivations to be part of the tour in order to improve and stress my professional skills and enlarge my horizons.
Let’s focus on the article now. I want to start from something trivial and maybe obvious but, for me, relevant: The Gap.
We are lagging behind the USA, China and Korea not only on the industrial and educational side, but also in terms of our capacity to develop an alternative vision of the World. Every law, every model, every idea is built on the attempt to chase our American colleagues, forgetting that we have a lot of capacity, financial and, last but not least, networking constraints.
We live, work, rise in an environment where, until a few years ago, we were talking about “Small is good”. So, if we want to compete with these technology giants, we have to find a congenial battlefield where we can show the know-how and the skills that make us grate and famous all over the world.
Obviously we have to believe on the possibility to close the gap when we facing our political and educational inefficient programs, financing our schools and our Universities and building up an attractive environment where our brilliant students and entrepreneurs will be able to harness the full potential of the global market. The word “innovation” has to become our mantra tailored on our peculiarities.
I am impressed about the paragraphs of the article related to the good practices in New Orleans and Austin, because it is the idea of growth that distinguished an equal country from an unbalanced one. If we want to achieve a strong and solid growth, we have to invest in our education sector in order to give our students the opportunity to efficiently learn STEM, with the aim of taking into account the work gap, which is a necessary condition for our firms to compete against USA’s technological and innovational companies, while also asking for a high profile political and public administration.
We have to forget the narrow vision coming from our background and everybody has to have the courage to do their own part, by simply changing their mind. I am sure that if every Student in Italy is just like what people saw in this community, we will be able to mind the gap sooner than we think.
I hope to hear other point of views from partecipants and, obviously, from you Stefania.
Ciao
Hello everyone!
My name is Alberto Da Rold and I’m a student of Mechanical Engeneering at university of Padova but I’m from Belluno a small city near the Dolomites which are an UNESCO world heritage.
I’m fond of innovation and new technologies, I’m curious and I always try to learn something new from the world. This personal attitude lead me to be one of the founder member of Fablab Belluno and a member of the Blockchain Education Network (BEN).
My passion for traveling and will to learn English were the reasons that push me to spend each year part of my free time of the summer to study or work in other countries, for example Dublin, Liverpool, Plymouth and the last but not least London where I worked for two months.
First of all I would like to thank all the people that make this project possible. I’ve never seen such a fantastic opportunity as this forum for sharing knowledge and opinion among students. SVST is really something that could improve my personal skills and change my mindset, I don’t want to be obvious, but I think that SVST could really change my life too. I’m so exited to have discovered all of this in time and I hope to be part of Silicon Valley Tour 2018!
Let’s start! I partially agree with you, Enrico, when you say that there is a gap between Italy and USA, China, Korea. About the education gap I think that our school and university systems are very different from, for example, American’s ones and it’s difficult to say which is better.
In my opinion Italians student study a lot of theory and different subjects, they are open minded, creative and innovative; however this potential is not exploited enough because of the lack of connection between schools, universities and the industrial world. We are reducing this gap by adopting work-school alternation which I consider a good starting point, but off course there is a lot to do in this way.
However, there are some exceptions to the general trend: for example, in the area where I live there are some of the most important eyeglasses companies in the world that are financially helping professional schools for training new students with particular skills connected to the eyeglasses sector. Unfortunately it’s a rare case in Italy and help come from a private company and not from the public administration as it should be. (http://www.bellunopress.it/2012/10/15/perito-per-le-industrie-dellocchiale-confindustria-belluno-dolomiti-e-iti-girolamo-segato-attivano-un-nuovo-indirizzo-di-studi/) sorry if it isn’t in English.
I think that in America one of the main problem of education is the high cost of college, which families must bear largely on their own and is higher than in other advanced nation like Italy. Furthermore the education system is not able to prepare underprivileged Americans to college and this cause inequality. (Maybe this is the reason why there aren’t enough graduated coders)
In the article these problems don’t emerge; although in the tech field America is pushing for an equal and distributed education, also thanks to the big companies, if we analyse the situation from a wider point of view we could see that probably for Americans students is more difficult to climb the social ladder and has less opportunity to realize himself/herself.
In conclusion I think that we are not lagging behind USA and other nations in terms of education, on the contrary we are in a privileged position, but we should take advantage from our potential and invest more in University research and innovation taking into account that we have an industrial gap that have to be closed.
I’m an optimistic person and I deeply believe that giving the same opportunity to everyone is as important as valorise diversity and the Silicon Valley Study Tour is a fitting example of how people can share and growth from the different opinion of others without any prejudices.
Do you agree or disagree with me? I look forward to your feedbacks!
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