Some ideas about Brazilian postgraduation

Ribeirão Preto, 25/10/2017

Image: mindandi / Freepik

The potential of Brazil to become a world player, consistent with its size, population and natural resources, depends on its ability to develop science, technology and innovation in the coming years. This will require an effective educational system at all levels.

In recent years science and technology have received financial support from national and state governments and have grown in size and geographical distribution. Although the number of Brazilian national and international publications has increased significantly, the impact of Brazilian science, measured by the number of citations in international journals, has plateaued. Since most research is carried out in postgraduation programs, this should be of concern to all of us at the university.

In 2015 I wrote a diagnosis of postgraduation and faulted CAPES for emphasizing productivity over other qualifications of the students¹. Indeed, there are few other parameters that can be used when evaluating courses that have thousands of students.

We can improve the level of both master’s and doctoral courses by introducing new disciplines that focus on the “formation” of the student rather than “information”. Our students arrive with different educational backgrounds and deficiencies in some areas. Docents can improve the quality of postgraduation from the bottom up by creating new disciplines which emphasize the skills required to do science.

Our objectives should, among others, be to create an environment where students can think, be curious, analyze and think critically and rigorously in order to identify, formulate and ask relevant scientific questions, communicate and understand the nature and importance of interdisciplinary research. In short, we have to prepare our students to be able to navigate in a world of huge, growing amounts of information and to continue learning and developing after receiving their diploma.

Lewis Joel Greene
ljgreene@fmrp.usp.br

Note

1. GREENE, L. J. It is time to review the Brazilian postgraduation system [online]. SciELO in Perspective, 2015 [viewed 26 October 2017]. Available from: http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/01/26/it-is-time-to-review-the-brazilian-postgraduation-system

Reference

GREENE, L. J. It is time to review the Brazilian postgraduation system [online]. SciELO in Perspective, 2015 [viewed 26 October 2017]. Available from: http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/01/26/it-is-time-to-review-the-brazilian-postgraduation-system

About Lewis Joel Greene

At present, he is volunteer full professor (senior collaborator) of Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, at the Department of Cellular, Molecular Biology and Pathogenic Bioagents. He is supervisor of the Protein Chemistry Center at the Fundação Hemocentro in Ribeirão Preto, where he conducts studies on chemical, functional and structural characterization of proteins, using traditional approaches in protein chemistry and proteomics analysis.