14 high school students selected throughout Italy
June 21, 2017 - "It was like getting into a time machine, to take a look at my future", says Ludovica, one of the 14 high school students involved from 12 to 16 June in the first edition of Summer lab. An intense week, between lectures and research laboratories, in direct contact with professors and researchers of the Faculty of Engineering, to quickly move from theory to practice.
“I really enjoyed the tissue engineering seminars and the topics of biomedical engineering – said Lorenzo, a seventeen year old from Lodi. In the Neuroscience laboratory we saw the new generation prostheses that exploit nerve impulses. Things that seemed like science fiction to me but are practically reality. I had never entered a laboratory in a scientific faculty: I was greatly amazed by the state-of-the-art equipment”.
Research was the heart of the summer school attended by students from the fourth year of high school Barletta, Bitonto (BA), Caserta, Celano (PZ), Lodi, Marciana Marina (LI), Marigliano (NA), Modica (RG), Rome, Pomezia, Sassari and Jesi. Selected from over one hundred applications, they proved to be among the liveliest minds of generation Z. On the other hand, each of them, applying to the Summer lab, had expressed their inclinations and secret dreams. Among these Matteo, from Sassari, wrote: "If in the future I become an important person, I would like to be so for having done something that has facilitated the daily life of many people". This is why teachers UCBM, organizers of the initiative, then transformed the aspirations of the young students into a busy program of seminars but above all of practical experiences.
From school to university with Summer lab
Some of them seemed to already have very clear ideas, such as Gabriele, a computer enthusiast with a life project: "to create a multifunctional robot capable of receiving commands from a simple phone application, and then re-executing them, useful for example for people with mobility difficulties". Leaving Rome, you concluded: "I think it was an important opportunity to understand how a university works and plan for future years". So the two Apulians, Dionisio and Pietro, returned home with a load of new ideas. The first, arrived in UCBM with the desire to work on programming languages and algorithms, has found bread for his teeth. Pietro, on the other hand, recounted the practice carried out in the Chemistry laboratory where he-tells-“with the other guys, we built devices that house healthy cells and can be implanted into the patient".
An exciting experience also for Marika and Ilaria, the two girls who - first in close contact with the Clinical Engineering service of the University Hospital, then in the biomedical measurement and instrumentation laboratory - worked with the equipment used in the hospital and with motion analysis systems and vital signs monitoring as well as on the study of bones. But in general, for everyone, one more tool to choose university life with greater awareness, 'the day after tomorrow'.
