Simon Nascimento, Admissions Officer, University of Chicago: I come from a small town in the middle of the country in Brazil. The name of that town is Catalão in the state of Goias about four hours south of our capital city of Brasilia. It’s also about 10 to 15 hours away from the major cities in Brazil like São Paulo and Rio. And right now, I’m an admissions officer at the University of Chicago. I’m part of the international admissions team and this past year, I was reading applications and recruiting students from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia.
My first contact with the EducationUSA office in Brazil was when I returned to Brazil after my exchange program here in the United States. I had spent two weeks here first in the January of 2005, a week here in Washington, D.C., and then one week in Muncie, a small town in Indiana, at classes at their local high school and also staying with a host family. And after returning to Brazil, we got together in Brasilia to do an evaluation of the program. The EducationUSA advisors from the city of Rio de Janeiro were there and they announced that they would be working with a small group of students who had been part of that program as they thought about applying to schools here in the United States.
Most of the Brazilians that I have met here over the past few years, at school and at work, when I tell them the name of my home town, they have never heard of it. They don’t know where it is. And they cannot imagine how someone from a place like Catalão ended up at a university in the United States and is now working with international admissions for a university here in the United States. And I don’t necessarily blame them because if you take into consideration that I come from a family of limited financial means, that no one in my family had ever gone to college before or even thought about that possibility, and that, if you met me ten years ago when I did not speak a word of English, then it makes sense that they would be surprised that someone from such a small place in Brazil ended up in one of the best universities in the world.
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