by John Gagnon, promotional writer
Aurenice Oliveira, assistant professor in the School of Technology, would like you to steer students her way.
In particular, she wants juniors and seniors to apply for an exchange program between Michigan Tech and two universities in Brazil.
The initiative combines engineering education, exposure to a different culture and sustainable energy.
Students must have a grade point average of 3.0 or higher and be enrolled in electrical engineering technology, electrical engineering or mechanical engineering.
Four students will be selected this year, three in 2009 and two in 2010. The deadline for applying for this first student cohort is Oct. 31.
Michigan Tech students will leave for Brazil in January when it’s summer in Brazil. Classes in Brazil start in March; in the meantime, students will receive intensive language instruction, since classes will be taught in Portuguese. Students at Tech will begin learning Portuguese as soon as they are accepted into the program.
Participants receive a $4,500 stipend to pay for air travel and to cover any difference between the cost of living on Tech’s campus and the cost of living in Brazil.
Oliveira says the goal of the program is to give students "a global perspective—exposure to a different country, a different culture, a different university and a different language"—all within the context of engineering and sustainable energy. She says Brazil has strong engineering programs and is a global leader in biodiesel initiatives.
In their careers, engineering graduates most likely will be exposed to globalization by working for multinational companies with foreign-born coworkers, with international suppliers and products that have an international market. "Higher education should start preparing global engineers," Oliveira says.
Michigan Tech, which has received $100,000 from the US Department of Education for this program, partners with North Dakota State University. The Brazilian institutions involved are the Universidade Federal do Pará, the largest and most influential institution in Brazil’s Amazon region, and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, a leading research university. The two schools have received the same amount of funding from Brazil’s Ministry of Education.
Four students from Brazil are already on campus.
Oliveira is the principal investigator and project director at Michigan Tech. A native of Brazil, she has studied and worked in the US for 10 years.
Stateside, the program is called "the U.S.-Brazil Engineering Education Consortium on Renewable Energy" and is under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. For more information, please visit
www.tech.mtu.edu/~oliveira/FIPSE.html or contact Oliveira at 906-487-3657 or
oliveira@mtu.edu .
