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I have started my internship for my master thesis in Munich at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) during October 2018 thanks to a funding from Fusenet. I have been here for 7 months (I made my second part of the internship with the Erasmus funding of my university). First of all I feel to be grateful to both Fusenet and IPP for the chance given to me to study in this centre of research. My work at IPP was about the development of a a technique that should enable to analyze the mode tearing modes that appears in the plasma of Asdex UpGrade.

My aim was concerning the application of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to Electron Cyclotron Emission (ECE) signals in order to find the position of a tearing mode and then to combine this analysis with the signal from the Coils in order to recognize its mode number. SVD has been applied till now mainly on Magnetic signals, so great part of my work was pretty new, especially the combination between the two signal. This has led to many problems of interpretation of results during my internship, but, thanks also to my supervisor, we have reached to some satisfying results. During my experience here I have learned a lot about how people work in a big center of research like IPP and the technical procedures normally taken into a Tokamak experiment. I also improved my computational skills (my work was essentially creating a good program for the analysis of data) and my physics knowledge.

Even if at the beginning I didn't like Munich because of its high life price (especially for the housing) and its tough weather, now I have finally managed to find my dimension also here. I have started to discover some activities in the city and even if it's quite hard to have contact with the nationals, I am starting to feel the real life of the city. Also the beer is very delicious!

- Stefano Marchioni