Gaetano Calogero

Hi, we're Angelo and Gaetano, former students within the MSc programme in Physics (curriculum: Condensed Matter Physics) at DFA. Just before graduating, we both spent the first semester of 2015 as Erasmus students at RWTH, Aachen, Germany, and at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, respectively, to work on our Master's theses.

When we left it was more or less like diving into an unknown sea: we didn't even know English that well, imagine German or Dutch. All we brought with us on that plane was excitement (always coming with a little fear), a laptop in our backpack, an entangled bike-bell each, Eddie Vedder in our earphones, and a whole lot of amazing stories by other friends who ventured in Erasmus before us.

What we brought back to Catania six months later (besides the thesis, luckily, and the certainty that Sicilian food and weather have no rivals whatsoever) was wide open eyes on a world of challenges and opportunities, enriched by many new friendships and vivid memories of wonderful labdscapes, interesting cultures, and amazing beers. To the point that we were brave enough to spend another 3-4 years in Dresden (Angelo) and Copenhagen (Gaetano) right afterwards, to get a PhD.

All in all, looking back at the last 6 years, we can say that Erasmus was a perfect playground to form our current personalities, and test that the education we got at DFA was more than enough to make us competitive students and researchers at an international level.