When Vittorio Ferrentino first arrived at CERN for a six-month master’s internship, he had no idea how much the experience would shape his future. Even amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, he found himself captivated by the world of accelerators. That initial spark led him to focus his master’s thesis on thermal transients in superconducting magnets for hadron therapy, and later, during his PhD in electrical engineering, to dive deeper into the complexities of accelerator physics.