Directors of funding agencies, professors, researchers and students have been meeting since Monday (29) at Unicamp to discuss the bottlenecks and the future of postgraduate studies in Brazil. The event, which ends this Wednesday (31), is part of the VI edition of GBMeeting (Meeting of postgraduate programs in Morphofunctional and Molecular Biology and Genetics and Molecular Biology at Unicamp). The objective of the meeting was to evaluate everything from the elements involved in choosing a research topic and the definition of a supervisor, to the difficulties in the sector, which is facing a drop in the number of applicants.
The opening table was attended by the dean of postgraduate studies and acting dean, Rachel Meneguello; the postgraduate coordinator of the Institute of Biology IB), Cláudio Werneck; of the postgraduate coordinator in Morphofunctional and Molecular Biology (BMM), André Damásio; the postgraduate coordinator in Genetics and Molecular Biology (GBM), Pedro Vieira; and the GBM postgraduate student representative, Mateus de Araújo Pessoa.
For Rachel Meneguello, academic life requires difficult choices, as students need to be aware that the projects they are involved in can last six or seven years, and will shape the rest of their career in academia. “Many factors lead us to think about going to graduate school, but we need to decide what to dedicate ourselves to. That's the dilemma. Because this involves an entire individual process of choosing, of vocation, and of adapting this vocation to the job. That’s why it’s important to understand the vocation of your work”, she teaches.
“This life of a scientist, of research, depends a lot on how much pleasure you enjoy working and doing. I often say that, as scientists, we bang our heads against the wall a lot, and when things go right, we barely heal and move on to the next challenge,” he said. the IB postgraduate coordinator, Cláudio Werneck.
Interaction between academia and the productive sector
On the second day of GBMeeting, the President of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Ricardo Galvão, issued a warning to higher education institutions. Galvão defended greater interaction between academia and the so-called productive sector and said that students must be trained to meet the demands of society. “Universities have to know how to train their students for society. To work in companies, in the public sector”, he warned. “They have to train more doctors, masters, for the demands of society”, he reinforced.
Unicamp's dean of research, João Romano, recalled that the table's theme treated postgraduate studies as the heart of Brazilian science. According to him, postgraduate students should think of academia as an option, not as the destination of academic activity. Therefore, he defended greater inclusion of graduate students in public and private companies.
“If none of the postgraduate students go to academia, science dwindles, but if everyone is, in some way, predestined to go to academia and simply be accepted into competitions, that's also bad. The system doesn't work like that. It's not for that. But we still haven’t been able to find a system that is suitable in Brazil,” she said.
The table also included the participation of Helena Nader, president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and professor Sylvio Canuto, who is a member of the Scientific Board of Fapesp (São Paulo Research Support Foundation).
The congress concludes the program with the theme “University Training and the corporate world”, with the mediation of João de Oliveira Jr and lectures by Ricardo Mirando and Suelen Silvana dos Santos.
