A few thoughts on my Alma Mater …

This text takes me back mentally 44 years to 1981, when I first found myself at the National Technical University of Athens, having just been admitted to the School of Chemical Engineering. It was still the era when classes were held in the historic Patission complex, with the exception of the first year, during which most of our courses took place at the Zografou campus.

Society was very different then — a society that had charted a path of development (which it continued to follow, with ups and downs, in the decades that followed), with still-vigorous industrial activity and a considerable number of heavy industries. It was a society in which young engineers, and especially NTUA graduates, had many opportunities.

I recall my student years with nostalgia. There was a great deal of studying, and laboratories that required daily attendance, creativity, but also a certain carefree spirit — and of course some intense and healthy debates — in a particularly politicised academic and social environment, just a few years after the fall of the Dictatorship. In those days (I do not know what happens today), the leading student union activists were usually also outstanding students in terms of academic performance.

With our fellow students, especially those of the same year, we shared a special bond. Because of the almost daily laboratory sessions and group assignments, we were like one large school class where everyone knew everyone else. Long-lasting friendships began then and continue to this day, despite the passing years, as is evident at the periodic reunions of our graduating year.

I was fortunate to meet significant figures in the academic world, such as the distinguished professor and later Vice-Rector, the late Theodoros Skoulikidis, and other exceptional professors, including the late Lefteris Papagianakis, Giorgos Kosmetatos — who also supervised my diploma thesis — and the then-young professor and later Rector Andreas Andreopoulos.

I completed my studies with distinction in 1986 and, after completing my military service, began my professional life in 1988. In 1989 I joined the newly established DEPA (Public Gas Corporation), where I have been working ever since — for the past two decades in senior management positions.

The only interruption was the period 1993–94, when my studies and academic performance at NTUA, together with my then-limited professional experience, gave me the passport to pursue and complete, on a scholarship, a two-year MSc programme in Energy Systems at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).

Many things have changed since then. My more than 35 years of experience in the energy sector have given me invaluable opportunities and exposure, the most remarkable being the opportunity to participate — from its very inception — in the enormous undertaking of integrating natural gas into the Greek Energy System. Yet I always recall with great emotion my student years at NTUA, as I did recently at an event held in the Kavtantzoglou Hall of the historic Averoff Building — years that served as the springboard for a wonderful personal and professional journey.