Why did you decide to study architectural engineering at Politecnico di Milano after your bachelor degree?
After finishing my bachelor’s in civil engineering, I wanted to continue my studies somewhere whose engineering education carries real weight, and Politecnico di Milano’s reputation in this field made the choice straightforward for me. The name of the school matters, but what mattered more was knowing that the training behind it is solid.I wanted to step into my career with confidence in the education I had received, not just in the diploma. Architectural Engineering was the right programme within that, because it brings together the structural background I already had with design, building physics and materials. There was also a more personal reason: Italian architecture has fascinated me since I was a child, and the idea of studying it in the country where it is all around you was something I did not want to pass up. Being able to do that in an international environment, in English, made the decision complete.
What are the main opportunities that this Master Program offered to your personal and professional growth?
The clearest thing the programme taught me is that design and engineering are not two separate disciplines that meet at the end of a project especially when sustainability is the goal, they have to be thought of as one whole from the very beginning, and that changed the way I approach every problem. My thesis is where this comes together most concretely: I am investigating how recycled textile waste can be turned into thermal insulation and internal flooring components, combining experimental testing with a Life Cycle Assessment of their environmental impact. Working in teams showed me both sides of that integration in practice: the difficulty of bringing different ideas and working styles together, and how much better the final result is when it actually happens. On a personal level, I made friends from countries I had never visited, and being surrounded by so many languages and backgrounds pushed my own language skills forward more than any course could have. Communicating every day in a language that is not my mother tongue gave me a confidence I did not have before, not only in presenting technical work, but in expressing myself as a person. That combination of technical maturity and social confidence is, for me, the most valuable thing I take away from the programme.
Are you satisfied about the knowledge and the skills acquired during the study program?
Yes, and the simplest way to explain why is to compare where I started and where I am now. As an engineer, I have developed enough design capability to run different analyses and actually produce a design myself, not at the level of a trained architect, but far beyond where my civil engineering background left me. Alongside that, working on several projects focused on sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment turned that interest into a real competence rather than a general concern.Seismic design of Structures was another turning point, because it made me see how directly geographical conditions and landforms feed into engineering calculations, something I had never thought about in such concrete terms before. Taken together, the programme has given me the ability to look at a building design from several angles at once; structural, environmental and architectural and that is exactly the skill I wanted to gain.