Obtaining an Internship In Brazil & Making A Resume in Portuguese
In Brazilian Portuguese, an internship is called an estágio. Like in other countries, it’s an opportunity for students or young people to gain experience in a company, either unpaid or with a small stipend or salary. In Brazil, interns are called estagiários, and to participate in an internship is to estagiar. In Brazil, internships are competitive, but some also opt to do internships abroad. In some cases, applicants have to take an entry exam, like you would have to for a civil service job.
Fantástico News Video On The Importance of Internships
Here’s a recent news segment from Globo’s Fantástico program about estágios:
Video: How To Prepare Your Resume For Brazil (In Portuguese)
And here’s a video from VEJA magazine, giving advice about how to prepare a resume, called a CV or currículo.
…And Here’s Some More Useful Portuguese Vocabulary:
Brazil’s lawyers have been shocked to find that a boy aged eight has managed to pass the entrance exam to law school.
The Bar Association said the achievement of Joao Victor Portellinha should be taken as a warning about the low standards of some of Brazil’s law schools.
“If this is confirmed, the Education Ministry should immediately intervene … to investigate the circumstances of this case,” said the association’s president in Goias state, Miguel Angelo Cancado.
Joao Victor is still in fifth grade, two levels ahead of normal for his age, but his mother says he is not a cloistered genius. “He is a regular boy,” she told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. “He is very dedicated, likes to read and study, but he has fun and makes friends.”
The Universidade Paulista, a multi-campus private university, said yesterday that the boy would not be enrolling any time soon: he still has to graduate from high school.
Still, the school said the “student’s performance, considering his age and level of education, was good, especially in the essay test, which revealed his good capacity to express himself and handle the language.”
“My dream is to be a federal judge,” the boy said, according to Globo TV’s Web site. “So I decided to take the test to see how I would do … it was easy. I studied a week before the test.”
Brazil requires every student to take an entrance exam before being admitted to college. Each university administers its own test, and the exams from private institutions are usually considered to be easier than those of public universities, which are free and attract many more candidates.
University officials said they could not release figures on the number of people who pass and fail the law school entrance exam.
As a former colony, Brazilian civil law is largely based on that of Portugal with statutes derived from the Romano-Germanic legal tradition, but has been amended to include some precedent-based common law.
Fantástico is Brazil’s own, idiosyncratic answer to Sixty Minutes.
Fantástico regularly lives up to its name and satisfies Brazil’s passion for the supernatural and the offbeat. In 1996 it created a major stir with exclusive footage of what it claimed to be two UFOs seen over Brazilian cities. And in 2001, it had a report about a flying woman who was found in a Brazilian village.
This hour-long show features short, always interesting news reports on world events, interviews with international celebrities as well as great investigative reporting and funny clips and out-takes from television around the world. Fantástico in many ways holds a mirror up to Brazil’s attitude to the world and its place in it. As a result, the show simultaneously reflects the country’s seriousness and its surreal sense of fun.
A staple of Brazilian television for more than three decades, Fantastico competes even with the telenovelas at the top of the nation’s TV ratings. In its many years on air, Fantástico has interviewed international stars from Pele to Paul McCartney, Alfred Hitchcock to Bill Gates and even Michael Jackson. The show has started to gain a popular online following due to the outrageous nature of some of their reports, and also because of their international celebrity performances. You will find many clips from Fantástico on YouTube. Fantástico is aired on Rede Globo on Sundays at 9:00 PM in Brazil.
Here are some clips from Fantástico that I think really highlight what this hour-long news show is all about:
Brazilian Politician Uses Stolen Donations to Build Himself a Castle
Edmar Moreira: taking plitical greed to a whole new level
This first one I remembered watching the last time I was in Brazil in 2009. It really struck me because it reveals the sheer brazenness of corruption in Brazilian politics, and the attitude of helplessness that Brazilian people feel in preventing this kind of thing from happening. It is also testament to the fearlessness of Fantástico’s investigative reporting in a country where corruption runs deep and can be a dangerous thing to talk about. Basically what happened was that this small-time politician, Edmar Moreira, a representative from the state of Minas Gerais, secretly built this totally ostentatious medieval-style CASTLE (using funds stolen from social contributions) somewhere out in the countryside. That’s right, it was not a just mansion, but a castle. And unsurprisingly, this castle did not appear in his tax return. “Castle Vania,” as it is called, is reported to be worth more than $20 million reais. Moreira probably would have gotten away with this whole thing if Fantástico’s reporters hadn’t come in and blown his cover, reporting that this castle actually belonged to him. Since the story became so public and controversial, the Brazilian General Attorney (Ministério Público) made some public statements of outrage regarding the matter and promised to investigate. Of course, the case against Moreira is still pending and he has run again for re-election.
An Illiterate Man Enrolls In A For-Profit School In Brazil
Ok, this second video clip is a bit newer, and I couldn’t find the clip of this story that was aired on Fantástico, but it also illustrates the Brazilian media’s brilliant investigative reporting.
Some background on this story is that for-profit “educational institutions” have become a recent phenomenon in Brazil, much in the way that they have here in the United States. It has become common knowledge that for-profit schools use shady recruiting practices (like the way University of Phoenix recruiters were notoriously caught going to homeless shelters to boost their enrollment numbers). Basically for-profit education has no standards and they will let anyone into these schools because students are just like paying customers, so more students means more money. So what happened here was that journalists found an illiterate man who had passed the entry exam of a for-profit school in Brazil. The illiterate candidate says that he “just guessed” on the questions which resulted in him passing the test. He then attended the school for three years. Even though they profess having standards for entry, would a school really admit a student who couldn’t read or write anyway just for their own gain? The answer was yes.
Here’s the link for article from Rede Globo if you prefer to read about it:
And lastly, here’s an interview by Fantástico with Michael Jackson in Brazil from 1996. Search for more Fantástico interviews with American stars on YouTube if you are interested, they have interviewed everyone, even Justin Beiber and Miley Cyrus.
In Brazil, a college major is called a graduação. Unlike American universities, Brazilian colleges allow students to graduate as lawyers, doctors, and other specialized careers from their undergraduate studies, which for these majors is sometimes more than four years of study. We’re going to take a look at some common Brazilian majors:
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