Campinas

I lived in Campinas during my undergraduate studies at Unicamp. Campinas it's one of the biggest Brazilian cities. The metropolitan area of Campinas is the center of a huge metropolitan region with four million inhabitants, consisting by 19 cities and encompassing one of the major Brazilian technological poles. The region is known as the "Brazilian Silicon Valley", because of its research centers and universities such as and University of Campinas and Embrapa. Campinas means grass fields in Portuguese and refers to its characteristic landscape, which originally comprised large stretches of dense subtropical forests, thick woods mainly along the many rivers, interspersed with gently rolling hills covered by low-lying vegetation.

The climate is tropical but mitigated by elevation (Köppen type Cwa), with lower rainfall in winter and annual average temperature of 22.4 °C, with dry and mild winters (rarely too cold) and rainy summers with warm to hot temperatures. The average annual rainfall is 1424.5 mm. The wet season is from mid-October to mid-April, with heavier rains particularly in December, January, February and early March, and the dry season is from mid-May to mid-September.

Campinas is the richest city in the metropolitan region of Campinas and the 10th richest city in Brazil, showing a gross domestic product (GDP) of $15 billion US Dollars (2008), which represents 1% of all Brazilian GDP. Currently, the city concentrates around one third of industrial production of São Paulo state. The region hosts more than 10,000 medium and large companies, many of which are among the largest and best companies in Brazil, such as Honda, Toyota, Unilever, Mann, 3M, Sherwilliams, Bosch, Pirelli, Dell, IBM, BASF, Dow Chemical, Villares, SEMESA, Ericsson, Singer, Goodyear, CPFL, Elektro, DPaschoal, Sotreq, Valeo, Rigesa, International Paper, Nortel, Lucent, Samsung, Motorola, Medley Pharma, Romi, Tenneco, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Mabe, EMS Farma, MDS Pharma, Altana, Solectron, Magnetti Marelli, Amsted Maxion, Eaton, Galvani, Selmi, Nutron, AmBev, Caterpillar, Bombardier, Atento Brazil, ACS, Dedic, CAF and many others. The petrochemical complex is centered in Southeastern, a few miles of Campinas, near the refinery of Petrobras Planalto Paulista (Replan), the largest in Brazil one of the largest in Latin America.

The city is also an important and diverse shopping, owning two of the largest shopping malls in the country: The Iguatemi Campinas and Shopping Parque Dom Pedro. It has, in its metropolitan area, the Viracopos International Airport, which stands in the international transport of cargo. In addition the region is home to many research centers and universities, such as LNLS, CPqD, CenPRA, Embrapa, Unicamp, Facamp and Puccamp. The presence of one of the largest oil refineries in Latin America, operated by Petrobras in the neighboring county of Paulínia, has attracted many petrochemical companies to the Campinas area, including DuPont, Rhone-Poulenc, and Royal Dutch Shell.

I studied physics at Unicamp from 2006 to 2010. The University of Campinas (Unicamp) , is one of the best Brazilian universities. Its main campus is located in the Barão Geraldo district, 6 miles (10 km) away from Campinas, with additional campi in Limeira and Piracicaba. According to the Times Higher Education it is the 2nd best university in Latin America. Unicamp is recognized as the most prolific Brazilian research center. It is responsible for around 15% of all Brazilian research, and has 53,6% of its students at the graduate level. The University of Campinas was founded in 1966 as a strategic formation center for highly qualified workforce in technological and scientific areas. With time the university diversified becoming a beacon in human sciences, arts, and economy. Unicamp is the number one producer of intellectual patents in Brazil.

While at Unicamp I studied calculus, linear algebra, programming in high level languages, classical mechanics, experimental physics, probability theory, electromagnetism, modern physics, numerical methods, chemistry, radiation detection and interactions, structure of the matter, mathematical methods applied to physics, quantum mechanics, radiation biology, cell biology, experimental methods of physics, magnetic resonance, radiation protection, and image processing. This broad formation provides virtually unlimited possibilities ranging from programming, image processing, imaging methods applied to mineral and oil exploration, biology and much more. During my undergraduate I worked during two years with professor Andre Koch Torres Assis doing undergraduate research in electromagnetism. During this time we publish 2 papers at the American Journal of Physics and at Ciencia & Ensino (Unicamp). We also participated in several national and international conferences.

I also worked 2 years with professor Jose Joaquim Lunazzi. During this time we develop activities related physics teaching, bringing high school students to the university of Campinas and presenting low cost physics experiments to them. We did it in several presentations along this period, inside and Unicamp. We introduced self service panels in several schools of Campinas and region to boost the interest in physics. More than a 1000 students have attended our event. At the same time other activities were also established like IT support, website development and maintenance, maintenance of experiments database, etc. supporting lecturing activities. In my last undergraduate year I worked as a intern at the center of biomedical engineering - CEB as a software developer.

Campinas

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Unicamp

Unicamp's plate

Army School

Historic train station