What keeps you going? It used to be this keychain for me 😮

At the beginning of each semester of Control and Automation Engineering, UFMG students could participate of a program called PEC. Through it, we visited a company for a week and learned about what an engineer like us did for a living there. It was amazing to get me pumped for the upcoming semester.

In one of those opportunities I went to Vallourec, where I got delighted by the huge machines, incandescent tubes and could hear Marcelo Versiani give great lectures about things I would only learn in my undergraduate course 2 years later. I left there certain that the factory floor would be where I belonged and kept remembering about this for 10 years while I carried this keychain I got there, until it tore apart a few months ago. 😁

Years later, already at Cadence Design Systems, I joined Regina Fonseca, Gabriel Guedes, Rodrigo Soares and a few others to welcome our first PEC students. I will never forget what one of them told us at the end of one edition: “Wow, I got here hating programming and I’m leaving thinking about which software development modules I should pick next semester”. There is no way not to smile when remembering about this 💓

And you, what has kept you motivated and how will you motivate others in 2022? It’s a great time to think about it!