Question: What has been difficult in your career so far and how did you overcome it?

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 21 Nov 2017:

As my career path as been rather indirect and tortuous, there were many difficult things I had to overcame.
The difficulties that were most challenging for me where those related to interactions with people. The State in Calabria is not very efficient and often I ended up in situations where my rights as a student were not respected. For example, my Erasmus office didn’t notified me that there was a free place for a scholarship (I wasn’t entitled to university support to travel being the first of the rejected students) and they were not aware that there was a cooperation agreement with the Free University of Brussels (where I went), I had to find all this by myself. I did find it by word of mouth. I was in touch with students that attended such meeting – even if rejected like me – and I found out that there were more than one scholarships available as some of those entitled backed out, and I was entitled to one. The agreement with Brussels’s University was found out in a similar way: another student talked to a professor and reported to me so I could inquire as well (going in a European capital was a big thing for me at the time, as Cosenza is quite a peripheral city in Italy). Word of mouth wouldn’t be enough. In this experience I learned to drop all the worries I had about asking stupid questions or getting shouted after asking an unpleasant question to answer. I became able to question the Erasmus office until I got a credible answer or the name of another person I could ask questions too. Doing like this allowed me to have a great Erasmus experience that shaped me in the future years, starting with the process of getting an Erasmus scholarship. After that I had so many similar problems, but this was the first case and by far the most developing I managed to overtake