Landing.jobs Scholarship is a competition to pay the tuition fees of a Computer Science student and promote the access to IT university courses.
3 months have passed since José Paiva’s post about the Landing.jobs Scholarship (that’s a year in startup time). During that time, we had the pleasure of contacting with hundreds of young students that were about to enter the journey of their lives. More than 400 participants showed interest in the Scholarship, representing about 20% of first year computer science students in Portugal.
I’ve personally exchanged more than 200 emails with participants from all around the country who wanted to know more about Landing.jobs, the scholarship and even about what university/course to choose. It was really great to talk with so many students and understand what are their concerns and wishes, giving us precious insights about what to expect and how to adapt to that when they enter the job market. It’s not every day that we can have a glimpse of the future.
However, not all was fine and dandy. Several students said they were unable to pay for their tuition fees and other living expenses, especially the ones that had to live away from their home town and families. A few actually quit due to financial issues, the very thing we’re fighting against with this initiative. That is exactly the message we want to send to the market: your future employees need your help to succeed in this harsh world of increasing costs, student debt and low-paying or non existent part-time jobs. The economic crisis took its toll and we stepped up to show how employers can contribute to a solution.
A New Hope
With these challenges in mind, we had to find someone that would be an undisputed standard-bearer for this cause: a student committed to the cause, that could captivate both employers and future students.
As with everything concerning Landing.jobs, we never settle for the trivial. So we got ourselves a paradox, a Portuguese from Brazil. Confused?
Meet Rodrigo Oliveira, our first Landing.jobs Scholarship student:
Rodrigo is a freshman @ Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon. He lived 15 years in Brazil, so he still has that great Brazilian accent as a testimonial for his overseas experience, and he is all about learning and problem-solving. His first contact with programming happened during a Summer holiday in Portugal, when he started tinkering with a mod for GTA. Since then, he adopted a self-taught approach, through websites such as stackoverflow, and never stopped learning increasingly difficult coding languages and tackling more complex projects. He’s also a sports enthusiast, having practised swimming and football.
We invited Rodrigo to give us a small interview about his interests and what advice he can give to new computer science students:
1. What led you to choose Computer Science?
R.: In all school projects, since my childhood, I was responsible for handling all tasks that required a computer (video editing, printing, PowerPoint presentations, etc.), which made me spend several hours a day working with computers. My interest for programming arose in 2010 when I was playing with a video game mod and the following thought came to me: “How did they do this?”. I spent that whole Summer learning how to program in Pawn (a program language from the C-family), mainly through trial and error, changing small portions of the code and checking the impact they had in the output. After all this effort, I was able to create my own mod which had more than 14k downloads and it’s still used nowadays for some players. Adding all this to the fact that I love Mathematics and Physics, it became a natural choice to enroll in a Computer Science degree.
2. What advice would you give to anyone who is thinking of choosing this area?
R.: Anyone that wants to follow a career in computer science must have in mind that they are opting for a very unstable area, where the best solution now will not be competitive tomorrow. This means no one is allowed to stop studying and learning. You have to love researching and become an autodidact. We cannot be 0s and wait for the information to come to us, we have to be 1s. Are you a 1 or a 0?
3. What’s most interesting about being a Computer Science (CS) student?
R.: What I like the most is the ability to solve a given problem in n different ways, each with its pros and cons. The other thing is that CS never stops evolving, and does so at a very fast rate. As we get more experienced, we start perfecting our old methodologies or developing new ones. Good CS students are never outdated.
The Return of the Scholarship
During the next school year, Landing.jobs wants to keep providing our younger audience with great content. We have planned a few initiatives for IT/tech students but, for now, we will keep working with some of the Scholarship finalists who also showed great potential and have their stories to tell. If you want to be updated about this, just register at Landing.jobs and we’ll be sure to give you the information as soon as it’s available.
To wrap up this great project, I want to thanks our partners at Uniarea, who have a thriving community of high school and university students (and are our neighbours from the Eastern side of Rua da Prata). Be sure to check their site and follow their Facebook. We want the Scholarship to be the start of a very long and fruitful partnership.
I also want to send a special thanks to José Paiva, Landing.jobs co-founder, who was the Scholarship’s creator and sponsor, to Rodrigo Oliveira, for championing the values we consider critical to succeed in this challenging area, and to all participants who demonstrated interest in participating and promoting this cause.
If you have any questions about this, other Landing.jobs activities or are looking for career/education advice, be sure to contact us through scholarship@landing.jobs and we’ll do what we can to help you out. In the meantime, Aim for More!
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