A student from the University of Trento is the only Italian winner of the latest edition of the “Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities”; the grant sponsored by Google in collaboration with EmployAbility every year since 2010 for disabled students of European and Israeli university students.
Applicants are required to meet high standards of academic records and a particular predisposition to leadership and passion for Computer Science.
Tania Bailoni attends a master’s degree at DISI (Department of Information Engineering and Science). She graduated in October 2014. Her dissertation’s title was “Tecniche di progetto e pianificazione di wireless community networks (Planning and designing techniques of wireless community networks) and was supervised by Professor Renato Lo Cigno. Tania is the fourth Italian student to receive the 7,000 EUR grant sponsored by Google, out of the six editions of the competitive examination.
“The idea to participate was pretty casual. A former high-school professor of mine advised me to give it a try”, Tania says. “I almost did not believe it when I received a congratulation letter by Google: it was an absolute surprise to me!”
As all other participants Tania had to first submit her curriculum. The second part of the competition required the drafting of three short essays in English in which candidates had to describe the reasons why they had decided to devote their studies to Computer Science, their studies and projects and the potential future research prospects and, finally, to describe their leadership experiences in working teams.
“It was not easy to draft my essays, above all because they required us to be extremely synthetic: explaining the reasons for important decisions in 600 words was complicated! However, I must admit that, in the end, it was a success”.