Category: Brazil

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Universities in Minas

Minas Gerais is full of good universities.  We visited three: PUC-Minas, UNA and UFMG.

PUC-Minas is the largest PUC in the world with more than 56,000 students.  The campus is beautiful as you can see from the pictures.  We visited with some of the university leadership and then did a talk about the U.S. education system.   I was surprised by the crowd.  It filled the lecture hall and they said that they had to move to a bigger room.  This turned out to be the general rule in Belo Horizonte.  I think it is because they don’t see diplomats as often as people in Rio or São Paulo. We are always delivering our talks in Portuguese, which I also think is important.

UNA is a private for profit university.  It has ten campuses around Minas.  There was real professionalism around the place and they are obviously prospering.  For-profit institutions present a bit of a dilemma for us.  Of course, we can cooperate with them, but making grants etc. is a problem.  Some of these schools, like UNA, are very well run and they attract ambitious, upwardly mobile people and they can be very flexible and innovative. 
We did a lecture there too, to another very full room.  I was particularly impressed that they got this big crowd at 8pm on a Friday night.  I had underestimated the ambition of the students.  Some came to see us, but it was not uncommon for them to be at school at night.  In fact, after our hour-long talk, many of them went on to even later classes.  You have to respect their discipline.

Finally, we went to the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), another great university.  This visit was the ostensible reason for coming to Belo Horizonte.  We were meeting returned Science w/o Borders students.   We did a focus group with about sixteen of them.  Their experience in the U.S. was good.  Like others we have met, they talked about the greater flexibility and hands-on approach in the U.S.  They were impressed with simple things, such as professors being on time and keeping office hours.  Their principle problems related to coming back home.  Some said they were having trouble getting their credits properly recognized. 

Our focus groups are very useful not only because we learn a few things but also because it is good general contact work.  Students are pleased that we come out to talk to them.  I am really interested in their impressions.  As I wrote in other places, focus groups are not statistically valid, but as I am getting more and more of similar comments I am getting more confident that the picture is accurate.  SwB is working and it is benefiting both our countries.

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Farming and youth in Minas Gerais

We had to get up early to go to the experimental farm at the FUCAM project in Esmeraldas. We left at 7am but got stuck in traffic.  There was evidently an accident on the main highway, so we had to take the back roads.

The farm is a place for poor kids from rural Minas.  There are classes on singing and art, but also and most importantly on agriculture.  We had a great coffee break, with the snack foods of Minas, including pao de queijo and queijo de Minas.  Pao de queijo is a type of cheese bread, sometimes in little balls and sometimes in slices.   It is very good.  Queijo de Minas is a white cheese, sort of a firm version of cottage cheese.

The farm grows its own vegetables and has some left over for market.  Everything is organic.  Part of the education process is their environmental responsibility. Notice the dirt is brown/black. Most of the dirt around here is red or orange. This shows how much organic matter is in this farm soil. The pond below catches the runoff. There are talapia in it.  Talapia is one of the quickest ways to grow usable protein.  They can thrive in dirty water, in fact they prefer it.

On the way out they told us that there was one more demonstration.   We went to a small barnyard with various animals.  I thought maybe they would show us some tricks.   Instead, they showed us how they castrate a bull.  I got to stand very close.  I am glad that they didn’t hand me the knife.  They tie a string around the sack first and then cut.  There is not much blood, but I don’t think it is pleasant for the bull to become a steer.  This is the first time I saw this close up. I had a closer up picture, but it really was less interesting than you might suppose.  Google if you want to see it.  I did take a picture of the unfortunate animal before the procedure.  See below.

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Busy week

It has been a busy week.  I got back from the U.S. on the overnight flight at around 6:30am on Tuesday and went right to work, since we had a visit from UN Ambassador Susan Rice.  The visit went well.  I didn’t have very much to do with it.  My main contribution was to do a short briefing in a special country team meeting.  But I did have to attend a reception at the Ambassador’s house.  I had a good time there and met lots of interesting people, but it did keep me out late.

The next day was work as usual, but with another evening event, this one for the 50th Anniversary of Case Thomas Jefferson.  I had a good time there too.  The people at the Casa are some of our best friends and I got to meet leaders from BNCs all over Brazil.  But it was another late night, made later by the taxi situation.  The event was held at the JK Memorial, which is evidently far from any taxi stands.  I didn’t get home until midnight.

Ironically, I need the “time off” to work. I am writing EERs and I really need to write notes about all the important things that we are doing.  W/o notes, I will forget to follow up and much of this work will be lost. I am sitting in the Belo airport now.I like airports.I always get to the airport way early so I never miss a flight but I have lots of time.It is very valuable time, time to stop and think.I have written before about the gift of boredom.I sometimes cannot stop myself so it is good to be stopped by events.
Social events are important in Brazil, maybe more so than in some other places.   This is where we meet people, firm up relationships and get the ideas.  Being there is essential but it is the follow up that is key to happiness in our work.  If you push forward too fast and furious, you outrun your intellectual and organizational supply lines.   This next week I want to devote to the infrastructure of my job.  I need to write to write those EERs, prepare for the inspection and in general order my priorities.

I remember imperfectly something from the Book of the Tao – “Movement overcomes cold but stillness counters heat” and the other one, “Muddy waters left still will clear.”  I need some stillness to prepare for the next jump.

My pictures are from the CTJ 50th Anniversary celebration.  I took them with my mobile phone so they are a little blurry. 

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PLUG in Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte is a very pleasant city. The airport is way out of town, so you get a good look at the Minas Gerais countryside during the hour of so you are coming into the city. It is hilly and green. 

The city itself is developed and prosperous.  “The Economist” ran articles this week about Minas Gerais. You can read them here and here. There are great universities and an ambitious population.  It seems a nice place to live.

My first appointment was at PLUG Minas. This is a kind of training center and after school program for what I suppose we might call at-risk youth.  The youth seemed pretty happy and they were very polite.  They have music and arts programs, financed by the state government plus an English language program, which is what interests me the most.

Demand is high.  They have only sixty places and they get forty-four applicants for each place.  Classes are big, with thirty students in each, but they get good results.   The teachers told me that this is surprising to them and goes against much of what they thought about class size.  We speculated about why this might be.  Perhaps the technology is helping.  Lots of computer and online programs are available.   These can take the place of drilling that used to require the active participation of teachers. But I also think it is partly due to the selection process. 

When you have lots of applicants for a few positions, you can get the people who are smart and motivated.  It also helps that they know about the selectivity.  It makes them value the experience more and creates confidence.   We few, we happy few – it is encouraging to be part of a select group.  Of course, it does highlight the trade-offs that we have to make between excellence and inclusion and makes me wonder about scalability.

I have seen some very successful programs and some with retention rates so low that they are not worth supporting.   Our English Access program is a good example of something that works and so is what they have at PLUG. There are lots of factors, but to paraphrase Tolstoy, every good program is the same but every bad one is bad in its own way.  What is true about every good program is that the participants want to be there and they have the appropriate skills to do the work.  This is perhaps not sufficient for success but it is necessary. This is a simple truth, but unpleasant.  It sets limits.  If you spread any program far enough to include too many of the less motivated and the less apt, you fail. 

My pictures are from around Belo.  You can see it is a green and nice place. 

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… and the others don’t matter

A successful public affairs program depends much more on understanding of the environment and having the capacity for flexibility than it does on any kind of actual step-by-step planning.  There is a process but not a plan.  I know that my colleagues and I can find and use opportunities and I am sure the opportunities will be out there, but I cannot tell you what they will be.  If I did, I would have to aim very low indeed and I would miss the big chances.

Hunting analogies are a little UN-PC, but humankind grew up as hunters-gatherers. It is what we are good at doing.  We work naturally well in small teams when the teams are empowered to choose tactics toward a bigger goal. So let me take a hunting analogy. We are out hunting rabbits when we find a moose.  Do we continue chasing that rabbit and would we be considered failures for bringing back a moose instead of a rabbit?  What if we don’t see any game animals at all but find a hive full of honey?  The reason we should be flexible is because the goal is not hunting rabbits or hunting at all.  The goal is to find food to allow our community to survive, thrive and prosper.

Our industrial society achieved great success but changing this paradigm.  In our machine age paradigm we did indeed insist on the industrial equivalents of rabbits, but we were so productive and so adapt at controlling the environment that it made sense in many situations.  To take my analogy maybe too far, the rabbit factory was not equipped to process a moose.  The unexpected opportunity was worse than useless; it actually caused trouble for the machines.  I had an interesting education about this in forestry. The mills are set up to take particular size trees, in Virginia it is often about the size of a 30-40 years old loblolly pine.  A bigger tree is of little significantly less value, since it just doesn’t fit in the machines. Much of our human organizations are still machine-like.  This is sometimes stated as an indictment of modern society, but it should not be.  There is nothing more efficient than a machine bureaucracy in a controlled and predictable environment. My hypothetical rabbit processing operation will produce a lot more usable protein than one that is flexible enough to take a wider variety of inputs, providing you can assure the preferred inputs and you want to product.

Some parts of our public affairs operations can still effectively be treated as a machine bureaucracy.  These are the core functions. Processing visitors is a good example, as is producing editorials or fact sheets.  The visitors and facts are very different, but the process is very similar.

The part of public affairs that remains in the hunter-gatherer paradigm is mine.  Public affairs officers and their colleagues have the unstructured job of scanning the environment for opportunities and threats. The moose or the mammoth is still more important than the rabbits or the chickens in our world. But like our ancestors, we cannot guarantee finding them.  Our world is even more uncertain than the hunter’s.  The hunter knew the moose was good eating and understood some of the risks and rewards of taking it on.  The hunter also had no way of creating more moose and the moose was unlikely to cooperate with the hunters to achieve some kind of win-win outcome.

We don’t face the zero-sum relationship the hunters did.  Knowledge of the environment and the capacity to make friends and cooperate with allies means that smart decisions can vastly multiply our results.  We can sometimes achieve exponential results, where 2+2= 100 or more. 

But we still face the environmental constraints.  We need to take the opportunities when they are available.  This means we need to allow ourselves to become seriously “unbalanced” when the opportunities are there.  We must “neglect” important parts of our programs and sacrifice some good things in the pursuit of better things.  We must also be willing to cut and kill programs that are not working, recognizing that those programs on the chopping block may well have been our beloved stars of the recent past.

This is hard to do.  It requires judgment and the decision maker will always be second-guessed.  It is a curse of human perception that we really cannot see how things might have been.  A bold decision will create lots of change.  A great decision will create mostly positive results but there will always be some losses. Choosing one path involves not taking others. Those other paths have potential gains too.  After the decision is made and the one path taken, other will look down the paths not taken and often assume all the good things would have happened with none of the failures.  Imagination can always produce better results than reality.

Putting up with this kind of second-guessing is the price of making decisions. If you expect to be praised by everybody when you do things right, you are seriously mistaken and probably unsuited to leadership. I take some pride in annoying some people. If I think they are wrong, I hope that they dislike what I do.  Make sure the good people are with you and don’t worry about the ankle biters. I am approaching my second year in Brazil and we have achieved great things.  But none of the biggest things, the things I think will do sustainable good, were part of my plans when I arrived in Brazil in June 2011.   My slow moving dreams were overtaken by much bigger, better and faster aspirations of our Brazilian friends. Our choice was to stick with our plans and be able to take full credit for small success or join with others and deploy our small powers to leverage a much larger one.  With our friends we can take down that wholly mammoth.  By ourselves, we can knock a rabbit on the head, maybe corner a chipmunk.

Looking back at my last two years in Brazil, I achieved almost none of my plans.  But WE did much better. Good people understand and the others don’t matter.

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Rondonia: closed on Sunday

I am in Porto Velho, capital of Rondônia.  I will wait until tomorrow to judge better.  Almost everything is closed on Sunday.  I walked from the Oscar Hotel, where I am staying, to the Madeira River.  The only places I could find open were outdoor restaurants that had probably recently evolved from guys pushing carts.  There were plastic chairs and a kind of buffet.  It is always hot here and humid, so I stayed away from the mayonnaise potato salad.  Other things were okay.  I would not get fat if I lived around here. 
Near the Madeira River is a museum of the railroad. The Madeira-Mamoré Railroad was built 1907 – 1912 as part of a deal the Brazilians made with the Bolivians when they took over what in now the State of Acre. One of the purposes of the railroad was to link Bolivia with the wider world. The railroad was abandoned in 1972, when roads and waterways made it uncompetitive.  

One of my colleagues told me that the Oscar was really nice.  I have to wonder about his points of reference.  Suffice to say, it is no Marriott.  It is clean and functional, but not as nice as a medium priced hotel such as a Days Inn or Comfort Inn.  I think there must be a great potential market here for hotels.  Even small U.S. cities have a several decent hotels.  And they have chains, so that you can know what sort of standard to expect.  There is a dearth of good, medium priced hotels in Brazil and a dearth of good hotels in general outside big capitals.  We have the usual suspects (Marriott, Sheraton etc.) in big cities and Choice Hotels in a few secondary cities, but you are soon down to Ibis, and in many places not even that.  I wonder if there is something that discourages hotels in medium markets.

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Returned students love the USA

We are traveling around Brazil to talk to students who returned from SwB scholarships.  Our first group was in Sao Paulo at USP.

The group was positive overall. The first young woman to speak was eager to let us know how satisfied she was. People were so nice to her, she said, from the time she applied, through the special visa day until she got back to Brazil. The woman next to her also voiced her approval, but added that in her case it was particularly important that the program reached into the interior, where she was studying. One of the goals of the Science w/o Borders program is to reach into previously under-served populations. The geographical part seems to be working.

Both the ease of the program and the reach became themes. U.S. universities are uniquely suited to welcome students from around the world. We have experience in our own vast country of people coming to university from far away. Our universities have dorms, which is not a common characteristic worldwide, and we have teams in place to help students adjust. A couple students spoke up about the quality of the dorms. Like hotels, they said. They were impressed by the luxury of college campuses, with their gyms, theaters and swimming pools. Perhaps these kids should talk to our kids to let them know what a great thing we have going. Some kids who had gone to the University of Nebraska actually expressed their gratitude for not having much choice of where they would go. They were unfamiliar with Nebraska and would never have chosen it, give a wide choice. But they thought the program was excellent and they loved Nebraska because of its friendly and welcoming people.

One thing that struck several students was the big difference between the feeling on American campuses.  In Brazil they have lots of class time and less homework. In the U.S. they have less time in class but expect to study more.  They come to conclusions themselves and praised the open atmosphere. Our surveys indicate that SwB kids did well in U.S. universities and that among many their grades improved. A few kids explained from their own experience in the U.S. that classes were more challenging and more rewarding. They got better grades because they became more committed. Study was their choice and they reveled in it. It may also be that they do better because the trip to the U.S. represented a clean break with the past. They were free from many of the old strictures. The improvements in performance were most noticeable among the students who did less well in Brazil. Again, this is subject to interpretation. It could just be that they had more upside potential, but it obviously didn’t hurt that motivation improved. They didn’t know whether to characterize American punctuality and attention to deadlines as a positive or not.   It was harder.  One young man commented that you get your assignment and everybody is expected to have it done on time.  Excuses are ignored for the most part. The same young man mentioned the downside that pot-smoking was more common on campus in the U.S. He didn’t really say that he opposed it, but he did say that he was afraid to do it since the stakes were high for him and Brazil is he was caught messing up.

This led to a discussion of quality of students. Our first group of Brazilians was high quality, but there was some discussion of the future. The bigger challenge, they thought, was not academics but maturity and temperament. A SwB visit is often the first time a Brazilian young person will have been away from home. Some will be sorely tempted by the vices mentioned above, or maybe they will just cut class.  Or maybe they will suffer from melancholy and homesickness. Maybe all of these things in some measure. There were few negatives in these shouts of hallelujah. Most recognized the program was started only a short time ago and rolled out quickly. Paradoxically, there were complaints of too much and too little communication. I guess the general idea was that there was some confusion. Much of this is now cleared up.  Another complaint was in the nature of internships. It is hard for some people to get them. I don’t think this is a completely solvable problem. It is hard to get internships for Americans too. There is a lot of competition sometimes. There is little that we could and even less that we should do to help Brazilians out compete Americans and others.  Schools are making information available and the Brazilian authorities are working with firms. This is as good as it will get.

Many in the group were happy to learn that they could apply to the program again in graduate school.  This is also what many American schools want.

The first round of SwB was a success. We have seen a mutual enchantment. The Brazilians love the American schools and the American schools love to have them. So far, so good.

I have to caution that focus groups are not a statically valid way to measure opinions. They are good for generating ideas and making impressions, but we need to be careful that we don’t fall victim to availability bias, i.e. crediting information more because it is easy to get. But in this case, the ideas from the focus group tracked with survey data, so I feel confident in my impressions. 

My picture up top is my front yard.  I have not mowed the lawn since May of last year. Instead, I have been gathering seeds from flower beds I passed and tossing them around. This is what I have. I like it better than the manicured lawn.

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Usually you just get one

Like cats, we must have nine lives because Brazil keeps giving us “once in a lifetime” opportunities. The latest came at lunch yesterday with education leaders in São Paulo. To my growing amazement & delight, a representative of the state education laid out his aspirations to create a network of community colleges inspired by American models. He asked how we could help. What he wants is exactly what we are eager to give him: connections with appropriate Americans and the chance for institutional linkages. I would not have aspired to this in my more grandiose imaginings. 

The Brazilian side has the determination, the resources and the desire to work with us. Having all those things at one time and in one place is rare. All we need do is say yes and I will not let this pass.

This is the opportunity to develop in São Paulo the kind of phenomenally successful working relationship that we have with CAPES and MEC in in Brasília. We have the opportunity to be present at the creation, when the institutions are forming that will influence the lives of millions of Brazilians and – again – create and enhance relationship among Americans and Brazilians that will affect our relations for a generation.  Louis Brandeis famously said that the states are the laboratories of democracy. Brazilian states are not exactly like ours, but the laboratory of democracy can work here too. A success in São Paulo can be adapted and emulated by others. São Paulo has the resources to be the leader. We will help.

There is the old saying about limited vision, that a person cannot see the forest because of all the trees. This is so big that we almost cannot see it for what it is. It requires that we deploy our “new” paradigm of leveraging our influence by imaginatively helping our Brazilian friends. It is a win all around. We join in their dreams. They achieve their aspiration while satisfying those of Americans eager to get more involved in Brazil’s growing opportunities. I have no doubt that we will find lots of Americans and American institutions who want to work with this.  

I wonder how many more “opportunities of a lifetime” Brazil will give me before I am done here. Usually you just get one. It is scary. I always say that it is better to be lucky than smart. But how long can luck hold?

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Michigan visit

Vera and I met a University of Michigan delegation and accompanied them to meetings at CAPES.  CAPES told the University of Michigan folks that CAPES asked IIE to respect existing MOUs, i.e. if universities have pre-existing agreements IIE will channel students toward them related to the terms of the MOU.   This, he said, is another good reason to come to Brazil and make agreements.

He explained how SwB is working now.  Most undergraduates are assigned through IIE.  Graduate students require a more granular process.  Laspau is administering the graduate programs and will make the selection of programs if prospective students do not have a place in mind.  However, with a conditional letter of acceptance from an American university, students can go to CAPES and receive SwB funding.  CAPES may also issue conditional letters of acceptance.  There is a kind of chicken & egg problem here.  Sometimes students cannot finish their applications and get conditional letters of acceptance w/o conditional letters of support but they cannot get conditional letters of support w/o conditional letters of acceptance.   

CAPES pays stipends of $1300/month.  This is enough in some cities but not everywhere.   There is a $400 addition for high-cost cities.  This is not a finished process and there is still a lot of fluidity.  Some universities supplement stipends. CAPES is getting good cooperation with firms.   There is a shortage of science and engineering talent in Brazil.  Firms are eager to tap into a potential source of the best and brightest applicants.   Sometimes they are very specific.  Petrobras, for example, is interested only in PhDs.  CAPES mentioned Boeing as a good partner.  Boeing sponsored fourteen students in the first group of SwB students.  CAPES didn’t need the money for scholarships this year and instead asked Boeing to sponsor internships.  Boeing will sponsor thirty-one interns this year.

Currently, there are more scholarships available than there are qualified applicants at the graduate level, i.e. every qualified applicant succeeds.  The Michigan folks asked how they could increase their numbers.    They would like to get 15-20 Brazilians a year in the graduate programs.   They said that they were more interested in getting top Brazilian students than in getting money.  CAPES suggested some common sense ways to get more students.  An obvious target market consists of students already at the school, i.e. undergraduates in science and maybe even SwB undergrads.  The challenge is finding them in a cost effective way.  CAPES has lists, but for privacy reasons cannot share them.  Michigan will have to use the old fashioned ways of meeting and greeting.

Applicants to PhD programs at Michigan do not require an MA, but those starting right out of UG will probably require five years to finish their doctorates.   CAPES will pay for only four years.  Michigan did not see this as a problem.  They can fund the fifth year, if needed.   Michigan guarantees support for all graduate students, conditioned on their continued good grades etc.  Michigan has admissions twice a year, although fall semester starts are much more common and graduates around 260 engineering PhDs each year.

The Michigan folks explained what they see as the strength of U.S. engineering students in general and Michigan in particular.   American schools are very welcoming to foreign students.  Michigan has a Brazilian student association and a Brazilian-American professor on the Michigan delegation assured At Michigan, students get lots of hand-on experience.  Michigan students and professors are well integrated with businesses.  There is lots of cross-fertilization, with academics providing brain power and theories and firms contributing money and a practical reality-check.  Making Brazilian education more like this is a goal of the SwB program.  Brazilian universities tend to have a more hands-off and even a vague dislike of working too closely with business.   Michigan has a research budget of $1.27 billion; the engineering departments have “only” $190 million.

CAPES asked the Michigan folks to send more students and especially PhD scholars to Brazil.  They want Brazil more connected to the bigger world of science and engineering.  They are not very worried about Brazilian students going overseas and not coming back.  This could happen sometimes, but Brazil is offering so many opportunities these days that they expect to provide good jobs for all Brazilian technology grads and then still have a labor shortage.  

In the interests of internationalization, CAPES, which evaluates and certifies all university programs in Brazil, is considering adding an international exchange component to its evaluation criteria.  A structure change like this is a big deal.  It will alter the incentive structure and so the reality of how the system works.

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O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!

We had an interesting discussion with a Brazilian student recently returned from a Science w/o Borders scholarship at the University of Nebraska. When we set these kids off to places like Nebraska, I wondered how they would adapt to the cold. There is no place in Brazil that ever gets as cold as Nebraska does on a typical night in February or March. In fact, summer in Nebraska is cooler than winter in most of Brazil.   But they evidently liked the cold or at least didn’t mind.

He talked about the differences in our countries. Little things count. Brazilians hug on the first meeting, Americans not so much.  Brazilians and Americans like beans. But the Brazilian black beans and rice is very different from our pork & beans that Brazilians call sweet.

On the plus side, people are similar in both countries in their general goodness. Our Brazilian friend cautioned his fellows not to mistake Americans’ more distant body language as a sign of distance of coolness.  He said that the people of Nebraska were almost uniformly friendly and welcoming. I felt proud of my fellow Americans.

One big surprise for our Brazilian friend was how sparsely populated were the “big” cities of Nebraska.  Nebraska is not the most densely populated of American states, but American cities are fundamentally different from Brazilians ones.   Brazilian cities are much denser. You are driving through mostly empty territory until suddenly you see a city. It is almost like looking at a wall of tall buildings rising out of the soil.  American cities have extensive suburbs. You begin to drive into the city long before you get to the center.  And when you get to the center, it is often not very densely settled.  I have noticed this difference myself when driving and flying. When flying over the U.S. at night, you see lights spread out over wide areas.  There are houses and streets down there.  In Brazil there cities are areas of very bright light surrounded by darkness.