News from the EPS Young Minds Section in Catania
The main goal of the EPS-YM Catania Section is to create a network of young passionate Physicists. In recent years, our section seriously suffered from a lack of student involvement. Hence, one of our missions is to build a virtuous connection between students and researchers, to fuel the curiosity for future studies, and to be aware of the chances offered by the territory.
Students choose university courses mostly based on what they like, but rarely do they know what working in a particular area truly means. This is the case both for research and industry. Even if there are many informative initiatives, our feeling is that students can best appreciate a work experience told by colleagues just 2-5 year older than themselves. For that reason, we decided to start the “Young to Young” (Y2Y) initiative: a series of meetings where young speakers (Ph.D. students, researchers, young employees of the local industrial network) tell students why they choose to do a PhD course at UniCT or to work in a local enterprise. In these meetings, the speakers talk about their research work, presenting their (scientific and human) experience in a very informal way, focusing on their personal path from Master Degree to their actual achievements.
In the first two events, we invited a PhD student and a young Post-Doc, both coming from the University of Catania, but with two different paths. Riccardo Urso, who recently finished his PhD in Astrochemistry, has just taken a post-doc position in the Institut d’astrophysique de Paris. Giacomo Torrisi is a PhD student in Materials Science, who recently came back from i3N Cenimat of Lisbon, where he spent 6 months on a photovoltaics application. They both talked about their experience as students in Catania, underlining the possibilities that our university gave them and the importance of the period that they spent abroad.
The initiative was well received by the students, with very active participation by the public. In order to test and improve the effectiveness of Y2Y initiative, we made a survey of the public, and the outcome was enthusiastic. The quality of the events is greatly appreciated, showing how an unfiltered and very colloquial talk is a great way to communicate science and future perspectives to a younger audience. The Y2Y initiative will go on, as one of our ways to follow the philosophy of EPS Young Minds, aimed to create links, to remove barriers between students and the professional world, and to forge a new generation of enthusiast scientists.
