Finishing my studies and some thoughts
This is a slightly longer note than usual, but I wanted to write it down: I’ve finished my studies! 🔥
I earned a Master’s degree in Statistics and Data Science at Sapienza University of Rome, after completing a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics at the University of Padua.
It hasn’t been a straight or “obvious” path, but looking back, it almost feels inevitable.
I’ve always been fascinated by numbers, data, formulas, and generally by how we can try to describe the world in a rational way. Not so much to reach absolute truth, but to better understand uncertainty. Over time, statistics became exactly that for me: a tool (almost philosophical) to read reality.
During my final years of high school, I spent a huge amount of time thinking about what to do next. Perhaps obsessively, I started making lists of all possible degree programs. I checked each one, reading curricula, courses, career paths, and tried to imagine myself in each program.
Slowly, I started eliminating options, until only a few remained. They were all very different:
- Geography
- Philosophy
- Computer Science
And then there was one I had almost ignored at first: Statistics.
At some point, I realized that statistics was the only field that could connect all the others.
It could interact with social sciences, economics, philosophy, computer science, and natural sciences. It was applicable to almost any domain of knowledge. It wasn’t just “doing calculations,” but building models, making hypotheses, testing them, making mistakes, correcting them, and reasoning about the world.
So I chose Padua.
My years in Padua were very enjoyable and formative. The program is solid, rigorous, and highly theoretical. I built strong mathematical and statistical foundations and learned to reason in a structured and precise way. But over time, I felt the need for something different.
I wanted more practice, more projects, more hands-on experience with real data.
That’s how I decided to move towards Data Science and to change cities.
Rome wasn’t just an academic choice; it was also personal: leaving my comfort zone, changing context, challenging myself.
At Sapienza, I found an environment much more focused on projects, applying tools in practice, and working with complex, real-world data. I could combine the theory I had built over the years with practical applications, databases, programming, machine learning, exploratory analysis, and visualization.
It wasn’t always easy, but it was exactly what I was looking for.
Now this chapter is closed.
What remains is the way of thinking about problems, the questions (probably even more than before), and most importantly, the desire to continue using data to understand more about the world.