From the 30th of June to the 2 of July I participated to the Scuola di Orientamento Universitario 2020 event. It was a 3 day program in which university lessons, exercises and group activities took place, as well as moments of comparison and interaction with the students. Organised by the confederation of 3 schools: Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Scuola Normale Superiore and Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS of Pavia. It’s entirely free and only the students that have completed the 12th grade can apply. The number of student’s selected this year was about 300. The course was held entirely online through the Cisco webex Events hosting platoform because of COVID-19 situation, but there’s going to be a school visit in future for the students that have participated, so we can try the residential experience that all the ‘Allievi Ordinari’ of the school live every day during the University period. Here you can find the program.

The seminars I took part

Each day, you had to enter the room of one out of six webinars, and all of them were about very different topics, from philosophy to computer science or from politic science to neuroscience and so on. These are the ones I attend:

Day 1.

The talk was about consciousness, a topic I think is becoming more and more relevant these days with the improving of A.I. technologies. We discussed a philosophical thought experiment: “Mary’s Room”. In a nutshell, it attempts to refute the theory that all knowledge is physical knowledge. The conversations was really intriguing and made me ponder upon some profound questions I have never thought about, such as: could it be that there are fundamental limits to what we can know about something we can’t experience? And would this mean there are certain aspects of the universe that lie permanently beyond our comprehension?

Day 2.

We have addressed the issue of immigration and security which are constantly at the center of the public debate. It is a theme that is often debased in the media debate through the use of commonplaces or easy connections. The speaker tried to dissect and show the complexity behind this debate. On the one hand, clarifying the conceptual ambiguity of very complex words such as migration and security. On the other hand, using data: how data can help us dismantle clichés, dismantle connections that seem obvious but in reality they dont’ and also how data can be misleading and how it can be read in an oriented and tendentious way.

Day 3.

Professor Tommaso Cucinotta described us the main stages of the history of computer science. We received an insight on the fundamental inventions that allowed computer science to take off, with the aim also of making it seem less magical. In fact, even when we receive a new phone, that is potentially able to perform numerous and complex functions, it is normal to think that something extraordinary may be hidden behind it. It was nice to retrace what brought us to computer science like it is nowadays.

My experience

For a young student, facing the choice of a university path, requires an awareness that is certainly not easy to acquire and it is even more complex to orient oneself knwowing that there could be an an additional university study path such as that represented by the didactic offer of a School of Advanced Studies in Italy. The S.O.U. gave me a broad perspective of the possible paths to take for my future. I discovered new interests and I had great conversations with the tutors-students about the topics I am more curious, such as the activities and programs that each University offer to the ‘Allievi Ordinari’ or how much coding they do in a Computer Science major, what tips could they offer to pass the admission test and how hard it is etc…

I think this was definitely the part that I enjoyed the most because the tutor-students made us very comfortable trying to answer and clarify all the doubts and questions that we had.