Good people, a lot has been discussed about the university of the future, right?
And I think there is a common sense that favors this faculty of the future.
because if we stop to think,
100 years ago, things were totally different than they are today,
our relations, [the way] how we moved, in short,
but if we were to look at the classroom, it was like that 100 years ago
and today it continues the same way.
You may have changed the photo …
it was black and white and now has a better resolution, it is colorful …
but it’s basically the same thing.
And the point is:
I’m being university now, today,
and I’m going to have a training that does not meet the demands
of our new reality because my university is from the past?
Or rather, how can I have the best university education possible
What do I have now?
And that’s a question I’ve been asking myself.
I am a student here at UFRJ, I am a university student,
and it is a rather difficult question to answer,
but I think I have some visions and conclusions,
which can serve as tips, which I would like to share here.
So, let’s think about the university of the future,
instead of the university of the future.
And for starters, it pays to understand
as this educational model that we have today was born,
and this has much to do with the period in which it was established,
which was a period marked by Fordism,
by the way of production that prioritized the scale versus the quality,
which prioritized the uniformity of customization,
by means of production lines.
And it makes a lot of sense, if we stop to think,
because, at that time, knowledge was an extremely scarce commodity.
Knowledge was not accessible, it was in few places,
and one of these places was precisely the university.
So the university’s role was to disseminate, in a scalable way,
this knowledge, albeit superficially,
to take the one who got his paper straw
to the labor market, if he chose this path,
or to the academy, if it really wanted to deepen and produce knowledge.
So if I go to put myself in this model of education,
I, as a student of international relations,
I go to college, they throw me in a classroom,
to study International Relations 1, my first subject.
I study International Relations 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the first period
and, as soon as I reach the International Relations Matter 35,
I’m entitled to a paper that says I’m a graduate.
Anyway, the problem is that this stops working
when knowledge ceases to be scarce and knowledge becomes abundant.
If it was once a “precious metal”, like gold, it is now a commodity.
We have access
and what separates us from practically all the knowledge that man has produced
It’s just the internet, it’s a Google search …
And then, I do not speak information.
It’s not knowing how tall Everest is or, anyway …
It is to see articles, study articles,
have access to classes, books,
and even if this requires a learning curve, it is there.
And also has a second extremely important point,
and that changes since the formation of our outdated educational model
which is the ability to perform,
which is no longer extremely costly and complex
and, today, it is more accessible.
By achievement, I mean actually doing things.
So, for example,
as it was to produce a prototype of anything 100 years ago,
when was that line-forming model born?
It was practically impossible.
You had to rent a lab,
you had to spend some time running behind,
but today we can make a real prototype
with a personal 3-D printer.
Or, what was it like to sell something? Let’s suppose you want to sell something.
A while ago, you would have to open a physical store,
a damn bureaucracy,
and today you can set up an “e-commerce” in two hours,
or sell through the Facebook page.
You can mobilize people around a cause
through social networks.
You can advertise your music without needing a record label
to pay the radio guy to play his sound, anyway.
But magic happens
when we add abundance, abundant knowledge,
and greater capacity of accomplishment,
This is for college, but also for university students.
The university now has the privilege of being able to have experiences,
of being in an environment that is conducive to new experiences,
and this is fantastic.
I also started to realize that some college students
realized that they could use this to their advantage,
and began to have a …
to find their purpose, to do something that made sense and that moved them.
It was very interesting that, always with this formation based on experiences,
and not based on that production line,
they were after experiences relevant to themselves.
And something in common between them was to find an interest within the university
and then go to some kind of accomplishment,
this realization which, in the beginning, in almost all cases,
it’s a bit difficult, it’s got problems,
but who can overcome these problems improves, develops,
evolves, seeks new interests,
he is good at what he does and really finds his purpose,
besides producing something relevant.
I, as I am not selfish, will share some stories
of some university students who opted for this experience-oriented training.
Then, first, Paul,
who was a student here of the CT, of the UFRJ, of engineering.
He himself had difficulty going through the basic cycle
and realized that other colleagues had too, that this was a problem …
students with potential end up repeating subjects …
and he decided to develop his own method
to help these students.
He managed.
After making a little mistake, to improve your product,
managed to arrive at an extremely efficient method,
which today most of these students use to pass on these subjects.
And that gave rise to your company, “Responde Aí”,
which today is one of the main “start-ups” of education in Brazil.
Or also Rubens, who is graduating from communication here at UFRJ,
who, in a matter in which he had to make a short film,
used to the maximum what the university offered him,
contacts, production, research, the workforce of their colleagues,
to produce something he considered the best quality.
This made the school work
arrived at the official selection of Cannes,
what is awesome.
Or Lucas, an engineering student,
who had an uncle with a motor problem
and needed a prosthesis that cost about $ 20,000
and had no condition to pay.
He, with the help of teachers,
developed a much cheaper, more scalable prosthesis.
and that solved this pain, and today is something economically viable.
There are other examples as well: that of John,
who always liked journalism, in-depth journalism, different,
and so began a digital magazine
which produced content in the way that he thought made sense,
and, thanks to this magazine, he arrived at a dream job,
an internship in the magazine he most admired in “Piauí”.
Or Juliana, from São Paulo,
who had some problems in the community where he lived
and succeeded, with the help of university colleagues,
with the help of teachers,
create an NGO that helps people in your community.
Or even the Solon,
who always liked business administration
and studies engineering at the IME.
And there, he had a sensational result in the junior company,
could find out what she really liked
and is currently the largest investment bank in the country,
doing something he likes doing a relevant job.
So, that question from the beginning,
“how can we get the most out of the university,”
a difficult question to answer
and that I think I have no ability to respond yet,
we can see that, in these cases,
the students got the best of the university,
they managed to extract the maximum, they found something that made sense to them
and began to produce relevant things.
And that’s because they used these new tools
which are available to our generation,
instead of waiting for the university to give this training to them.
And that’s the message I want to leave:
if the university is an extremely large organization,
bureaucratic, averse to changes, secular,
the university student is the individual,
and the individual can change simply with his will.
And, as it seems to me,
when this will is to realize experiences,
it achieves legal results quickly and fairly effectively.
So this is the invitation I want to make for you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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