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For my graduation project for my master’s in nuclear fusion, I went to the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) located in Lausanne at the EPFL campus. I worked with Alessandro Geraldini and Stephan Brunner (my supervisors) on developing a new code that simulates the boundary layers of magnetized plasmas. This project involved combining analytical work and programming, which I love. It was great and inspiring to work on something that pushes our understanding of plasma physics and nuclear fusion devices further. I learned a lot during my stay in Lausanne.

The internship took place at the EPFL campus. During this wonderful abroad experience I had the opportunity to learn a lot. Learning has touched many areas: from personal growth and independence to the improvement of the English language. Among the transversal skills acquired I also learned to deal with huge and complex codes and to tinker in the Linux environment. The thesis in its contents has been formative, since I came from an electrical engineering training.

My internship took place in Luxembourg at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. My task was to improve the optical system to guide charged particles in the field of instrumentation.

Having a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, I only studied plasma physics and fusion science for my thesis project, but I did not go through a proper introduction to the subject, which is expected during my master’s degree courses. I chose to attend the Culham Summer School before taking those courses, and I’m very satisfied with the outcome. The lectures were all very interesting, but the ones that caught my attention the most were those about tokamak engineering, plasma modelling and instabilities.

For the internship required for my masters Science and Technology of Nuclear Fusion and Sustainable Energy Technology (both at TU/e) I went to ITER. Supervised by Guido Huijsmans and Sven Korving I worked on writing a controller module for the nonlinear MHD code JOREK. It was great to write an own part of such an immensely complex and interesting code that is able to simulate so many interesting things. We discussed the project with several researchers at ITER who gave great input.

The project From February to May 2022, I spent my days working at ITER Organization for my Master’s internship project. Here I was supervised by Javier Artola, an incredibly knowledgeable and helpful person who made me feel right at home. The goal of my project was to simulate mitigated major disruptions in 2D using the non‐linear MHD code JOREK. Major disruptions are events that consist of rapid loss of plasma equilibrium and confinement. This results in rapid loss of the thermal energy and plasma current, effects that could lead to damage to components surrounding the plasma.

First of all, I would like to thank Fusenet and Eurofusion for providing me with financial support during the summer school in Prague. SUMTRAIC is an experimental SUMmer TRAIning Course in plasma physics in magnetic confinement fusion device (COMPASS tokamak) organized at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (IPP CAS), Czech Republic.

At a time when most events were being moved online or cancelled altogether, the team at IPFN (Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear) from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal decided to forge ahead with the 8th edition of their in-person Fusion-and- Adventure-Extravaganza, aptly named PlasmaSurf. And despite being plagued with the familiar uncertainties of life during Covid, I think all the participants can say we are glad they did.

Master thesis at SPC, Lausanne Collisional radiative codes are essential tools for the interpretation of optical emission spectroscopy (OES) measurements, from which it is possible to obtain information on plasma parameters such as temperature and density of the plasma.