Today we visited a Catholic University in Santos that specializes in physical therapy, nutrition, and pharmacy. The facilities were extremely clean, organized and professional. All the equipment in the labs seemed state of the art and there was definitely more emphasis on the undergraduate curriculum rather than the graduate curriculum. We visited chemistry labs, physics labs, health labs and even saw a few dead bodies (one too many if you ask me). We even attended an actual class. I sat in a Psychology class that was going over the way the brain interprets pain, at least I think. The lecture style was very relaxed, students were having many side conversations and many students also left class for one or five smoke breaks. We said our goodbyes to the class and then headed out for lunch.
After lunch we returned back to the University to do an engineering project. We built a small motor in one of the physics labs. I tried and failed kinda miserably, but I did see what I did wrong and learned from it. Actually building the motor helped me relate back to the turbines in the hydroelectric plant. Instead of turning a turbine to induce a current, a motor uses electric current to turn the shaft.
Having experienced the differences between college facilities and classes in Brazil and the United States helped me gain a better perspective of how Brazilians learn and eventually how they will work in the real world. This experience will hopefully help me be more accustomed to the way different cultures get educated.
Yup, another verbatim school blog entry. Today was definitely interesting but considering I'm trying to be a mechanical engineer and I couldn't even build a simple motor is kind of disappointing. Hopefully this was just one minor setback. After all that scheduled crap we went to the beach and stuff and now I'm about to eat with some cool kids. It's crazy how I didn't know even half the people on this trip a week ago and now I feel like they're my best friends. Good stuff. Well thanks for reading, if you want to leave comments on what you REALLY want to read about just let me know!
No comments:
Post a Comment