Meet Francesco De Rose

Former exchange student at Linköping University

Describe your job and the kind of projects in which you are involved. I work as a software engineer at an IT consulting company. This means that, depending on the project, I take care of analysing requirements, or design software systems, and implement them.

Why did you choose Sweden and LiU to be the country and university for your international studies? As the end of my studies was approaching, I decided that I wanted to have an international experience, and that it would be great to use such an experience to do the project work for my thesis, so I applied for an Erasmus scholarship and looked at the list of partner universities which I could choose as destination.

I ended up choosing LiU because it has a world-renowned research group in Artificial Intelligence (which sounded very interesting as a thesis topic) and because I really felt like experiencing the Nordic culture and society.

How did LiU prepare you for your future career? Working at LiU in an international environment provided me with a very valuable experience. It is usually one of my “selling points” whenever I have a job interview.

Was there any professor who is especially memorable in a good way? What made him/her good? My Swedish language teacher was great! She had trained as an elementary teacher, so her lessons were quite shaped by that: she made us feel like children again, in a good way, and it was fun to improve vocabulary by learning children’s rhymes.

How did you find the LiU campus? Where did you spend most of your time? The campus is very nice, and you can find anything that you ever need within walking distance. Also, students can access the university buildings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so you can work very well at your own pace.

I spent most of my time in two places: the first was an office at the Institutionen for Datavetenskap where I did my project work, and the second was the technical library.

Could you describe any moment at LiU that was especially memorable? Well, the first month or so was memorable as a whole: having to register at university, getting my student room and meeting the corridor mates, the Swedish language course, the first parties, looking for a bike (as a student in Linkoping, you can’t live without a bike)...

Which of your expectations/assumptions about studying in Sweden and at LiU turned out to be wrong? Tongue-in-cheek, I have to say that it is not true that all Swedes are blonde!

Also, I thought that it would have been much more difficult to be an exchange students -- there weren’t many problems, almost everybody could speak good English and was helpful and supportive.
 

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Last updated: Tue Aug 14 16:33:21 CEST 2012