I cannot remember when was the first time I raised my head up to look at the night sky, but it must have impressed me deeply, because it caught my attention and took my curiosity forever. Although I was just a child, I really wanted to know more about the universe and to study what great things happen in it, so at the age of 8 I insisted on my dad until he gave me a telescope for Christmas!

Nearly 20 years later, after finishing my engineering studies, I have this great opportunity to participate in the GraWIToN project as an ESR at Laser Zentrum Hannover. My work area is focused on rare earth doped fibre amplifiers used in gravitational waves detectors that, one day, could allow us to study objects in the Universe that cannot be studied by using traditional observation methods.

My first month in the project has been very nice. I arrived at Hannover in mid-January, and rapidly started working. My supervisor, Dr. Peter Weßels, was very helpful introducing me to my new colleagues and preparing all I needed to start my work.

At the beginning, I dedicated several days just to study the documentation such as papers, book chapters and previous work performed in the group, but after the second week I went to the lab and performed, with the supervision of my colleagues, a first setup of an Er3+ doped fibre amplifier to do some initial measurements. After that, I have been working in a computational model to compare with the measurements to try to understand better the amplifier dynamics. Of course, these tasks are not immediate and require quite a lot of time and effort from my side, since several concepts are new for me, but I feel motivated and confident since I can always have technical discussions with my team mates and ask for some tips.

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