Last week classes resumed, after the school break the 20 undergraduate students returned to Unicamp's learning spaces. Buses and university restaurants are busy again during peak hours. This is the most visible part of the university, but the academic environment is much more than that. Inspired by an article in Jornal da Unicamp from 1986, “The rich life on campus”, it is worth looking at the past week in 2019.
Unicamp is perhaps best known in the city of Campinas for its hospitals and health units. These do not stop during school recess, after all, more than 1000 surgical interventions are performed per week, based on 2018 data. Postgraduate students also do not go on vacation whenever there is a school break, after all there are more than 1000 lines of research at the university that do not stop in July. And they need to prepare the defenses of their dissertations and theses, which summarize and validate the years of dedication to the projects. Last week, one defense in particular caught attention: Matheus Kleber defended his master's degree over the musician Chiquinho do Acordeon with a music recital. But that wasn't all: in 2018, 1364 master's theses and 994 doctoral theses were defended and, adding these numbers together, an average of 45 defenses per week in the different institutes and faculties is reached. Examples from last week? At the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rafael Ribeiro defended his work Driver's Vision Zone Detection System Using Depth Camera. On the other side of the campus, at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Ricardo Martins defended the work The Adequacy of Social Housing to Family Arrangements in the Municipality of São Paulo in 2010. Different themes, but the titles indicate their relevance for understanding and tackling issues of interest to society.
Returning a little to art, the Gallery in the Central Library building opened a new exposure. Other important topics were presented and discussed in other spaces, all in one week, with innovation being the highlight. There was, for example, the launch of a notice financing startups in conjunction with Petrobrás and Sebrae for projects seeking innovations in the energy area. Someone might ask: what about the results of these initiatives? Coincidentally, that same week the awards were handed out to the winners of the 2019 Unicamp Challenge. Two business plans were winners. One of them, in the words of an award winner: “Our business model is to separate plastic, paper and aluminum in a chemical production patented by Unicamp. The service we will offer will make companies more ecologically responsible, as recycled products can be sold as raw materials” About the second: “a business model based on a natural fungicide patented at Unicamp that combats two agricultural diseases and prevents reapplication of toxic pesticides”. Research and plans for companies based on patents developed at the university. These two winners will probably join the other 700 companies that are daughters of Unicamp.
Walking a little around the campus, we had another important event, the seminar on “Work and capital in the 21st century”, with the presence of a researcher from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, with which, by the way, Unicamp develops a strategic partnership. For a university, partnerships and collaborations are part of its essence. In this and the paragraph above, partnerships with a university, a company and a public body are mentioned. The topic, however, did not end there last week. Unicamp also hosted activities they discussed and analyzed aspects related to the BRICS economy, as part of the university network program of this important block of countries of which Brazil is a part.
It doesn't hurt to remember that the 20 thousand students who returned from vacation were trained in this rich environment, which cannot be compared to a company but to a city, in fact more than 50 thousand people pass through here every day. And this week we celebrate 30 years of the autonomy of São Paulo's state universities, an autonomy that makes weeks like the one described above possible, weeks that are repeated throughout the year.
