I got to go to Porto Alegre to tell the Gauchos that we were going to reopen the consulate in Porto Alegre. Well, not really inform, confirm. Everybody who might care already knew. It had leaked in Washington and was becoming general knowledge. Nevertheless, confirmation was appreciated. I got to do print, radio and TV. They appreciated my enthusiasm and previous connections to Porto Alegre. Mariza being born there was a big hit.
I did the usual public affairs work besides this. The Federal university did its first CONX program. They gathered about a dozen students to talk about U.S. elections with an American expert. Universities in Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Pernambuco and Roraima also participated, presumably with similar gatherings.
I spoke with deans at the Federal University about connections with American universities. We agreed that so much is happening that it is hard to keep track. It is an embarrassment of riches. But we have to get a handle on it. It is great when professors set up cooperation or exchanges, but the key to happiness is sustainability. We need champions to get things rolling but we need institutional relationship to keep it moving.
My last stop was the law school. They are working on investment laws. I didn’t know, but they told me, that Brazil has no bilateral investment treaties. This obviously is not a crippling impediment to investment, since there is a lot of it here and American firms have been investing in Brazil for hundreds of years. But it does add to uncertainty and creates unnecessary risk. Until recently, the Brazilians were not very interested in the idea of investment agreements, but now that Brazilian firms are making big investments elsewhere, interest is growing. We (in this case the Consulate in São Paulo) will probably participate in a program on investment law in September.
In the evening I had churrasco with Elio Lee, a friend from my first time in Porto Alegre. We have both grown older, but after a little while we found that we had not changed all that much.
Porto Alegre has really improved. I was not bad before, but today it has become a truly pleasant town. The neighborhood where we once lived, moinhos de vento, was a nice place back then. Today it is positively great, with lots of nice little shops and restaurants within minutes of our old apartment. You can see our old street, Rua Santo Ignacio, and a nice beer restaurant in the pictures. We could have bought the condominium apartment for around $60,000 back then. Today it would cost millions. We missed that boat. Of course, back then we didn’t have money to invest anyway.
It is not so bad to be stuck with little to do. I find it is among the best times to think. I planned a longer day in São Paulo than I had, i.e. I didn’t leave until 8pm, but my program for the day ended at 4:30. My last appointment of the day was at a meeting at the Coligação of binational centers, where we formally launched English3. It was at the Ibis hotel, right across from the Congonhas airport. My picture up top is taken from the roof of the parking garage at the airport, where I enjoyed the cool shades of evening spreading across the plaza. There is a foot bridge connecting the Ibis neighborhood to the airport, which is otherwise separated by a busy highway, below. I didn’t know it was so close and was going to take a taxi, until the guy at the hotel said it would take more time to ride than it would to walk; it was only a five minute walk. A taxi would have to have driven a mile out in a big circle to get across the road.
There was no line at check in, so time I had and I saw a few things I never would have. For example, there is a good churrascaria just across the street. I got a good meal there for $R12, which is less than 1/3 of what I would pay in near my house in Brasília. I also noticed the heroes of Brazilian aviation, pictured below.
Generally, however, it was just nice to have a couple hours of enforced lethargy. IMO, lack of such moments is harmful to people. We are always connected and so rarely reflect. Not that I came up with any great thoughts in the past couple of hours, but I did get that peaceful, easy feeling that comes from being well balanced. This is a feeling I get too infrequently in our connections rich environment. Much of my best work and almost all my best ideas come after some time like this, although usually not immediately. There is a lag time, maybe a gestation period.
Coincidentally, I was listening to an interview with an author of a book on how creative ideas are made. He talked about research that indicated what most of us know intuitively but often do not act on. Many good ideas come from the relaxed spirit. Running too fast and too long can result in you getting nowhere. Glad I got “stuck” and glad I didn’t bother to turn on the Blackberry.
Much of São Paulo is unattractive, but I like “my” parts. And I like to walk around town. Now I have a new restaurant (pictured above. I recommend it) to visit at the airport on the way home.
I don’t put enough time into gardening to be really good at it and my harvests result more from luck and the inherent characteristics of the plants themselves. I would starve if I had to depend on the produce from my soil. But I will be better next time. This year was a learning time. There are seasons in Brasília, even if it is a place of eternal springtime. After spending a year here, I hope I will have a better understanding of the subtlety of my garden. The obvious seasonal difference is the rainy versus the dry season.
As I explained in earlier posts, Brasília is a very strange place with regards to water. It is like a desert during the dry season, but unlike a place like Arizona there is no shortage of water on the Brazilian high plains. More rain falls in a couple days during the rainy season here than falls in Phoenix all year long. You could water your gardens and lawns every day w/o running afoul of water restrictions or even feeling bad about wasting a scarce resource.
Most of my neighbors are profligate water users and they can be because of the unique nature of the water cycles here. I did not and do not plan to soak my grass during the dry season. It is less because I want to conserve water, which around here really doesn’t make a difference, and more because I prefer not to have to mow the lawn so often. I did and will water my flower and vegetable garden, but it is not as easy as that.
It doesn’t seem like you can dump enough water on the garden during the dry season, at least I didn’t. I planted tomatoes, watermelons and lots of flowers. They grew fitfully until the rainy season, when they went through a phase change. I suppose it is a matter of how much irrigation you use. Brazilians successfully grow all sorts of fruit and vegetable around here, so it must be possible
I also need to analyze my soil. The gardener told me that the local soil is poor and sour/acid. I have been adding organic material, i.e. grass clippings, peels etc. but that doesn’t much change the Ph. I hope that Espen will be here during this U.S. Summer. I will have to feed him a higher quality diet than I eat, which means I will be grilling more and producing wood/charcoal ash that I can use as potash to sweeten the soil. I will get my soil in shape just about the time I leave. The Embassy will probably plant grass on my erstwhile garden and future tenants in my house will notice that the grass grows faster on that spot, but they won’t know why.
You can see in my pictures that my crops are almost ready to eat. I didn’t have much luck with lettuce. It is just starting to come up now. I think that birds ate the seeds. Well … I did a poor job of planting. Lettuce seeds are very small. I had trouble with them as they stuck to my fingers and got lost in the dirt. I should have started them in pots and then moved them. Instead I put them directly into the Brazilian clay with poor results. I planted the tomatoes seeds directly into the soil and it worked out okay. Tomatoes are forgiving, however. I only need to get one or two plants to work in order to produce more tomatoes than I could eat. The big surprise is the watermelons. I grew them from seeds of a particularly good watermelon. The vines grew slowly, with lots of flowers but only one fruit, which was damaged by some animal and rotted inside. I gave up, but didn’t bother to pull out the vines. I was surprised how they grew and then only a couple weeks ago I got a profusion of melons. I counted eleven, a few of which are getting pretty big. I read that you pick them when the stem entering the melon turns yellow. I consume one watermelon every two weeks, so if even a few of these come to sweet maturity I will be set for months.
I didn’t include a picture of my sweet corn because it is depressing. It just has not grown up to its promising start. I will leave it alone, however. Maybe it will work out as the watermelon did. My banana tree is growing robustly, but I am told that it will not produce bananas for about a year and half.
It is a lot of work to dig up all plants and create a garden and I don’t always have time to do it. I will work on this a little at time, incorporate my compost etc. and have it ready for the next rainy season. Next year will be better, with my improved soil and enhanced experience. The wonderful thing about gardening is that you get many chances for iterative learning and improvement.
We invested a lot of time and money in this recent trip by Brazilian leaders of higher education and I think it was well worth it. An early indication of this was the Brazilian willingness to be partners. It is always better if both sides have some skin in the game. The Brazilians paid for all air travel and per diem for their participants, a big investment. Beyond the cash outlay is the commitment demonstrated by the willingness of so many busy leaders to take three weeks out of their life – sacrificing their Carnival holidays, BTW, to take part. This not only indicates that they value the enterprise up front but also that they will be more committed to worthwhile results to make sure they justify the investment.
It was clear to me that the Brazilian side took this very seriously. Our own commitment of money and attention of our own high-ranking personnel made it clear to them that we were fully onboard. The visit would have been a success if all we accomplished was confidence building, but there was much more.
All three of our groups received warm welcomes everywhere they went, which with few exceptions ranged from enthusiastic to very enthusiastic. American institutions clearly think it is time to get involved in Brazil and this program is a fantastic opportunity for them. Our groups got enough firm commitments from American institutions to absorb all the students that Brazil could reasonably send their way.
On the Brazilian side, this visit and deepened their growing understanding that Brazilian students should be spread across in many institutions and that excellence exists in all fifty states. The original formulation was to send students only to the so-called top-ranked institutions. Meetings during this visit confirmed that depending on the subject a University of Nebraska can be better than a Harvard. I believe that most of the Science w/o Borders students will end up going to large public research universities, like the land-grant institutions, mostly because they demonstrated the capacity and interest to accept relatively large numbers integrate them into their academic communities and help them get practical expertise thorough existing intern or co-operative arrangements that they have with local firms.
Our Brazilian partners also came to a better understanding of the role that community colleges play in developing and maintaining a 21st Century workforce. Because of this visit, at least some Science w/o Borders will spend time at community colleges, principally to give them intensive instruction in English and acclimatization to the American system. Community colleges already play a role very similar to what the Brazilians need, bringing immigrants and first-time college students up to speed to benefit fully from the educational system. A potent collateral benefit was to convince there influential Brazilian education leaders of the usefulness of extending their nascent network of community college equivalents. I am certain that this will encourage links between community colleges in the U.S. with Brazilian partners in a ground floor opportunity that will enrich both sides.
We cannot overestimate the importance of the contacts made and the excitement generated. The program touched key decision makers. The Brazilians who participated are in strategic positions to make changes in Brazilian higher education. The Americans they met are in similar positions in the United States. Their collaboration will bear fruit in ways we can only imagine. I believe that scores or even hundreds of future linkages among Brazilian and American institutions of higher educations will trace their provenance to this two-week crucible.
The Brazilians are making a big investment in their future and tangentially in ours. We are lucky to be present at the creation of this wonderful program, which means that we have been able to help our friends shape the program’s initial form, which in turn will have follow-on effects for many years. This visit is helping us all benefit of this opportunity of a generation.
It is always an honor to meet kids that are so hard-working and a pleasure to share in their aspirations. This is what I got to do yesterday at the Casa Thomas Jefferson branch in Taguatinga, a satellite city near Brasília, when I met this year’s English ACCESS students and presented them with their scholarship certificates.
Fifty-four new students got ACCESS scholarships, which gives them two years of English study at our BNC (We cover the cost of fifty; CTJ adds in four more.) The kids are all low income and from disadvantaged backgrounds. English will give them a big boost and will help boost their communities. Being involved is also good public diplomacy for us. It helps build and maintain the web of relationships on which our good relations ultimately depend.
Relationships are why I think it is so important for us – for me – to be part of these things. I was talking to my colleague Marcia about that on the way to Taguatinga. Since I just got back to Brazil the morning before, I had a lot of work to catch up, lots of paper to push. I was really “too busy” to take the time out for this ceremony. But we work through Brazilian people. My job is relationships. Paper pushing is only a means to that goal. Our program CAN go by itself. We can pay the money and forget about it. But that is like planting a garden and not taking advantage of the fruits and flowers.
An American diplomat is sufficiently rare in the lives of these students that I believe that they will long remember that I shook their hands, called them by their names and gave them their certificates. It gives their program an American face – literally. Of course, I also had the chance to renew my acquaintance with school leaders from Brasília and our friend at the BNC. This is what public diplomacy is about.
Marcia wrote my comments, which I have included below for reference. I still don’t trust my Portuguese to completely. Besides, at official events it is important to hit the main points but not to talk too long. W/o prepared remarks, I tend to ramble on too long. I ad-libbed a few comments at the end. I thought it was important to tell them a little about their own importance for the future of their country. Talented people have the privilege and a duty to develop their skills for the good of their country and the world in general. We need to remind ourselves and others of that. I find that most young people are receptive to that message. They want to be part of something bigger than their daily lives. I also wanted to remind everybody about the Science w/o Borders initiative and the opportunities and responsibilities that it brings.
The CTJ in branch in Taguatinga teaches around 1,250 students. Among them are 250 who get their instruction at a local High School – Leonardo Da Vinci – after school. CTJ pays the school 10% of what they get in tuition. It is easier for students just to stay a little longer at school than it is to fight traffic to get to the CTJ facilities. This is a good partnership that benefits all around.
CTJ people tell me that there can be significant differences among the students they attract in different locations. The Lago Sul campus gets mostly upper and middle class students. They often spend a long time at CTJ and learn to speak English almost flawlessly. Taguatinga is not much like Lago Sul. Most of the students there are poor and many come from single parent households. It is harder for them to continue their English educations, but it is a tribute to them and their parents that they continue to show up.
The ACCESS program in Taguatinga has an excellent retention record, despite the challenges of its students. Of the 54 students who entered the two-year program in March of last year, 52 have returned for the second. CTJ staff is active in creating this happy result. The CTJ teachers and administrators take it personally. I heard one story about a young woman from last year’s class who was going to drop out. She was getting married and her prospective husband thought that she had better uses for her time than to study English. The CTJ director called the future husband and explained what a rare opportunity this was and that he should not take it away from her. The young man relented and the young woman returned to class to finish what she had begun. I wonder what changes this intervention will make in her life and the life of her community.
In all there are 1,147 students in the ACCESS program in Brazil, in Recife, Sao Paulo, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Manaus, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and here in Brasilia.
My picture up top is the class picture. You may notice that most people seem not to be looking at the camera. This is because there were multiple cameras. The picture taking can take a long time; everybody wants a photo. The middle picture is a student from last year’s class and me. She had the scary task of giving a speech in English to the new students. She did very well. The bottom picture is the street outside the BNC.
Remarks below, FYI:
– Muito obrigado, Ana Maria!
– Muito obrigado à Casa Thomas Jefferson, à Secretaria de Educação do Distrito Federal e à Diretoria Regional de Ensino do Recanto das Emas pela importante parceria na implementação do Programa ACCESS.
– Bom dia, alunos do programa ACCESS e PARABÉNS pela bolsa de estudos!
– Vocês agora são alunos ACCESS da Casa Thomas Jefferson e participantes nesse importante programa de ensino de inglês, cultura americana e responsabilidade social.
– Sintam-se orgulhosos! Vocês fazem parte de um grupo de aproximadamente 1,150 (mil, cento e cinquenta) bolsistas Access espalhados pelo Brasil em cidades como Brasília, Manaus, Recife, Salvador, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro e Porto Alegre.
– À medida em que o Brasil cresce no cenário internacional, surgem muitas oportunidades e é muito bom ver que vocês já estão começando a se preparar aprendendo inglês.
– Além de abrir portas no mundo profissional, o inglês também permitirá que vocês busquem interessantes oportunidades de estudo no exterior, com programas como o Jovens Embaixadores, o Ciência sem Fronteiras e muitos outros que existem.
– Sejam curiosos, perguntem, participem e aprendam bastante. Da próxima vez que eu me encontrar com vocês, conversaremos em inglês,
We had excellent meetings at several universities. A few stand out. One of the last we visited and a good example is North Carolina State University. I can be a case study of what we want. If you want to find out more about Science w/o Borders in English, the NC State webpage is a good place to start.
Whenever you find something working really well, you should look for a champion, somebody just pushing the program, fixing the problems and making all the good luck just seem natural. At NC State that person is Michael Bustle. Having a practical champion is rarely sufficient to make a successful program but it almost always necessary. It is an interesting leadership question. Organizations need champions but you cannot really designate one and it is sometimes difficult to recognize the person involved, but you recognize the energy in the operation. It is usually the presence of one or more of these champions that makes an operation “lucky”.
There is more. NC State is a land grant institution. Land grant institutions and their like have traditions and advantages to draw on. Schools like NC State have experience with bringing in non-traditional students, educating them and adding value to citizens and society, as well as the mandate to work on practical sciences. They are, IMO, the places that will take most of the America-bound Brazilians.
Another advantage is the integration with local firms and government.I wrote about this in an earlier post. One of the biggest plus in American education today is its flexibility and connections. NC State is closer than some others. Some private firms are actually located on campus, actually a new one called Centennial Campus.
Centennial Campus sits on 1300 acres about a half-hour drive from the main campus. Private firms pay $35/square foot for places on campus, significantly higher than they could get farther away. They come for the proximity to students, researchers and professor. Many of the buildings were constructed by private firms for their own use. After 30 years, they will become the property of the university. I won’t try to describe all the specifics. You can read more details about Centennial Campus at this link. You will be impressed.
My top picture is the North Carolina State University main campus. Below that is a fermentation lab on the Centennial Campus, where students can work in real-world facilities. Bio-manufacturing is a technology which will grow in the future, but initial investments are high and risky. A competitive advantage in the future will be the capacity to transfer innovations from university environments to real-world applications. The bottom picture shows some of the firms that are participating on the Centennial Campus.
My perception of Science w/o Borders evolved during this visit. At first I saw the simple practical task of moving thousands of Brazilian kids to American universities in order to improve their educational opportunities. Of course, this is still the key task along the critical path, but it is not the big picture or the ultimate destination. The final destination is the internationalization or the re-internationalization (as I wrote in an earlier post) of Brazilian higher education.
Their American experience will indeed change and enrich the lives of the individual students. But the experience such a large cohort brings back to Brazil will also change Brazilian education. In addition to its size, this is a well-targeted program. The Brazilian students will be chosen from all over the country. They are already in place to become future leaders of the country. Their already sunny prospects will be further brightened by their international experience, the things they learn and the connections they make, not least of which the connections they make among each other, the Pygmalion effect at work.
They will bring greater internationalization to Brazilian education. For each one that travels in the first waves, dozens will follow along the paths created and widened. Beyond that, they will come back with new habits and different expectations.
Our Brazilian friends liked the flexibility of the American system. Brazil still uses something much more like the old inherited European system. There is not a lot of flexibility and tends to be less cooperation among departments than there is today in the U.S. This is true even within universities, not to mention among institutions or with outside private firms. American universities were like this but they had to change to adapt to the new realities, as I wrote in an earlier post.
We couldn’t keep the doughboys in their old habits when they came home after seeing Europe. The popular song “How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree” reflected this. Science w/o Borders affects nowhere near as many people and is nothing like the intensity, but it does have the advantage of concentration. Smaller numbers will have high leverage in the relatively rarefied, if rapidly growing, Brazilian higher-education environment. This is also a time of maximum leverage. Brazilian higher-education is in a transition, as is the country.
I understand that I am repeating many of the same themes. Maybe I should sometime combine related posts and make them more coherent, but I am writing day-to-day.
My picture up top show the SwB group at the Brazilian Embassy, where we were invited to give a readout of our various visits. We had a reception at the residence that evening. The second picture shows the entrance at Meridian House. Meridian House organized the program and we did a discussion there.
Our groups of Brazilian education leaders went East, West and Center to learn about Americans higher education and to explore opportunities for linkages, especially Science w/o Borders. Then we came back to together, gathering in Washington to discuss our experiences. We went all over the country, but we seem to have had remarkably similar experiences. I suppose that is because the ingredients were the same: Brazilian & American higher education folks talking about their interest in internationalizing their programs. There were some variations.
One significant difference evidently was the fame of Science w/o Borders. In the Eastern campaign, we had to explain details of Science w/o Borders, but most of our interlocutors already knew a lot about the program. Our Western group reported less general knowledge of the program. I can think of several reasons why this might be true. I also have considered the possibility that it might simply be a perception difference on our part or self-fulfilling, i.e. we got what we expected. But I don’t think it much matters. One of the central goals of our trip was to inform and persuade. In this we succeeded. Whether it was explaining details to the already reasonably well-informed or bringing new information to the erstwhile benighted, they’ve got it right now.
We found almost an embarrassment of riches. The American higher-education system provides more opportunities than can be exploited. A welcome challenge is the choosing among the many opportunities, but we should not believe that the beguiling number and variety of choices is not a serious challenge. Two extremes must be avoided. Our Brazilians friends are aware that they need to take care not to concentrate too much on a few places or dissipate their resources and people across to broad a spectrum.
IMO the best options are in the land-grant colleges and similar institutions. They have long had the mission and the infrastructure needed to take in large numbers of students from diverse backgrounds and they have first-class research capabilities in practical sciences – the kinds of things you need to build a country.
We were also mightily impressed by the community colleges we visited. They have the capacity to train large numbers in English and study habits. I believe that my Brazilians friends experienced a minor epiphany when the toured community colleges (our group visited Northern Virginia Community College and Montgomery College) and I did too, BTW. Before this visit They were not much interested in sending their students to community colleges, which they saw in the old paradigm as second-class or junior colleges. We were surprised by their connections with local firms and flexibility in responding to their training & research needs. Something along the lines of the American community college paradigm will be a key ingredient in Brazil’s development, especially in the integration of the new middle class into prosperity. Brazil has excellent universities to train the best-and-brightest. What they need is that bridge.
I was less enamored by the receptions we got at our elite universities. Maybe they are less hungry because they already have much more demand for places in their universities than they can possibly satisfy and maybe they think they have enough international connections, but the difference was palpable. We got enthusiastic receptions at the excellent middle ranked universities and community colleges; the elite universities were polite but we tended to get one or two officials explaining that it was hard to get in. This is no real problem. As I wrote above, there are more opportunities than our Brazilian friends can exploit.
I believe, and told my Brazilian friends, that rankings are overrated. As a practical proposition, you can get as great an education at a big state school as you can at the elite institution. They understand this and are sophisticated enough to look to programs and department, not to the big name. If you want to study water resources, you are a lot better off at the University of Nebraska than at Harvard, for example.
So I think this trip succeeded in fulfilling all the expectations. The Science w/o Borders initiative will succeed and we helped.
My pictures are from the recently completed trip. Most people will recognize the picture up top as the Chrysler building in New York with its art deco crown. The middle picture is the quad at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The bottom is the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. It was our first public university.
One of the things about American universities that most impresses our Brazilians friends is the density and depth of outside connections. Most American universities work in a web of other universities, private firms and NGOs to a much greater extent than their Brazilian counterparts. Students at American universities often work as interns and in co-ops with businesses. Researchers at American universities mix freely with outsider. American professors consult. Universities are not outside; they are fully part of society’s fabric. (This may seem obvious to us, but recall that many universities traditionally have seen themselves as separate with separate norms and sometimes special rules and laws. In Europe, they were based on religious institutions with traditions of separation.)
In trying to explain this difference, one of our Brazilian friends credited relative insecurity among American academics. He said that Brazilian academics are relatively well paid and secure in their positions. They are not hungry for other things. They don’t need to look for outside opportunities. Only hungry wolves hunt. American academics are hungry, at least in the figurative case.
This makes a lot of sense. I am not sure the hunger metaphor is perfect, but I do think that American universities have a feeling of incompleteness. They need to partner with outsiders. This makes the universities better and more robust as well as more useful to society.
This is not an uncontroversial idea. When I was in school lo those many years ago, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth that academics were getting involved with private business. There was a kind of chastity idea that universities should start apart from the hustle, bustle and especially the profit motives of the larger society. This has weakened in recent decades. Describing academics in an “ivory tower” – separate from society – is usually a pejorative description. But we still see some of this idea. There really is not much merit to the idea of separateness it, although it is resembles the valid idea that scholars should have some space for contemplation.
The value of a scholarly pursuit is that it should allow the thinking person the space to think. You can be so involved in doing things that you don’t have time to think about what you are doing or why. This we should defend. But a step back or a pause to think should not mean separation.
The irony for a scholar being separate is that separating yourself allows you to do exactly what scholarship should never do, i.e. isolating yourself from people and ideas that might challenge your own ideas. We all look for confirming information and people who support us. We need to be pushed out of this comfort zone usually by needing to interact with people who might prefer to avoid.
That is why it is good to be hungry, at least sometimes. It forces us to get out there, try new things, innovate and overcome. Challenges lead to growth; comfort to stagnation.
My pictures are Ben Franklin at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a man who questioned, tried lots of new things and produced practical wisdom. He founded the University of Pennsylvania, an academic pursuit, but he also invented the Franklin stove, very practical, discovered the nature of electricity, very technical, originated lighting rods, very helpful and described the Gulf Stream, very much natural science. And he did almost everything he did in cooperation with others. He in his person formed a good template for what universities might be. I also have a picture of a walking street at the University of Pennsylvania.
We met dozens of Brazilian Science w/o Borders student during this trip. The American instructions that received them like to bring them out to talk to us and they like to talk about their experiences in America. I can say with conviction that the kids are all right. They are adapting well as enhancing the reputation of their country.
The biggest challenge is an obvious one – the weather. There is no place in Brazil that has weather as cold as they are encountering in New York or even Virginia. Lucky for them, this has been an unusually mild winter in most of North America. Nevertheless, it takes a little while to get used to cold and to learn the art of layering.
A more pressing problem is time management. Students in Brazil spend more time in class, but have less homework.The SWB students mentioned that they have needed to manage their time and priorities more closely.Being a student in America requires more self-discipline, they said.On the other hand, if they manage their time well, they have time off on weekends or in the evenings.This is not a lesson only Brazilians need to learn, of course.I learned it the hard way in college and have to relearn it all the time even at my advanced age.
They didn’t think that it would much help to have some kind of course in time management before leaving Brazil. It is something you just have to learn by doing, they said. I suppose that is true. They also were not that enthusiastic about additional English before coming. They said that they perfect their English faster in the real world situation. The vocabulary they need is too specialized and only their fellow engineers actually can help them learn it. I have to qualify this statement a bit. The students we met are very good English speakers already. They came with TOEFL scores above 90. Many in the second and third waves of Science w/o Borders student may not have this level of proficiency. In other words, some additional training might be useful.
We don’t need to reinvent wheels that are already turning really well. Our Brazilian students praised the reception they received from the student services departments. American universities are accustomed to foreign students. They know how to help and have created structures to do it. They have already thought about, tested and implemented all of my bright ideas plus many more that I have not thought about. Sometimes you have to let people do the jobs they do so well, w/o second guessing them or substituting your own judgement for theirs.
The students praised the hand-on project based approach in American education. I mentioned some of this cross-discipline teamwork in previous posts. Everybody seems to like this as a learning tool, a way to speak English and a way to see how and why what they learn is important. Americans working with Brazilians on common goals. This is great.
I am reminded of the old saying that you don’t make friends fact-to-face; you make friends shoulder-to-shoulder, working on common endeavors toward shared goals.
My picture is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I managed to get over there for a little while in Sunday.
