Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica

Infobox_University


name = Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
established = 1950
type = Public
rector= Reginaldo dos Santos
city = São José dos Campos
state = São Paulo
country = Brazil
undergrad = about 600
postgrad = about 800
staff = unknown
endowment = about US$10 million in 2001
campus = Urban, inside CTA's campus
website = [http://www.ita.br www.ita.br]

The Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) or Aeronautical Institute of Technology is an engineering college maintained by the Brazilian Federal Government with the support of the Brazilian Air Force. It is located in São José dos Campos, Brazil. ITA is rated as one of the top and most prestigious engineering schools in Brazil, accepting little more than 100 students per year at its undergraduate courses. The school's admission exams for its undergraduate courses (called "vestibular" in Brazil) are considered by the media to be the most difficult and most disputed in the country, and are given annually in over 25 cities throughout Brazil.

It is one of four institutes that compounds the Brazilian General Command for Aerospace Technology (CTA), having its facilities, along with its laboratories and R&D centers, inside the campus of CTA. ITA is often mistakenly considered to be a military institution, because of its location, but it is civilian in nature, being composed of a vast majority of civilian teachers, directors and students. The Air Force does help maintain the institution, though, and in exchange uses it for the training of its engineers.

The institution was created in 1950, being responsible and contributing in a great extent for the research and development of the aerospace and defense sectors in Brazil, including the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research - INPE, Embraer and Avibrás.

ITA offers regular 5-year engineering undergraduate courses (Bachelor's of Engineering) and graduate programs including master's and doctorate degrees. All undergraduate students are granted full scholarships and board during entire five-year period. Complete residential facilities are offered to the students inside the campus, at a minimal cost. The college is known for being rigorous, demanding focus and a great effort from the students.

History

ITA was idealized and initially run by the Marshal of the Air Force Casimiro Montenegro Filho, who was then a Coronel. Casimiro was an Air Force pilot and pioneer, who had also received a degree in Engineering. The idea of building a school of excellence in Aeronautics Engineering and related fields came as the first step towards building a strong aeronautics industry in Brazil.

A commission for organizing the Technical Center of the Air Force (in Portuguese "Centro Técnico da Aeronáutica" or CTA - it was later renamed but the acronym remained the same) was created in 1946. ITA was to be the first institution in CTA, which would later harbor other aerospace related institutes.

Marshal Casimiro was very passionate and idealist, and was committed to creating the best school that could possibly be created. He visited the most renowned Aeronautics Engineering schools in the US at the time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Wright Field (home of the Air Force Institute of Technology). There he hired MIT's professor Richard Herbert Smith to help develop a plan for such a school, which was dubbed "The Smith Plan". Prof. Smith would later become ITA's first rector.

Casimiro hired renowned foreign professors and experts from various parts of the world to teach at ITA, the majority of them from MIT, influenced by prof. Smith. At a given time of its history, ITA had teachers from more than 20 different nationalities in its faculty, an impressive number, considering it had (and still has) a faculty of little more than 100 teachers. Nowadays the majority of the teachers are Brazilians, many of whom have graduated at ITA themselves. [ [http://www.pro-grad.ita.br/criacao.php Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica ] ]

It was mentioned in a book by Tércio Pacitti, a former ITA rector, that Casimiro went to great lengths in order to be able to hire and maintain such a 'super-star' faculty, since their pay was considerably high, a requirement to convince them to move to an unknown and poor country, as was Brazil in the 50's. He had, many times, to conceal their actual pay from his superiors in the Air Force, disguising it as other forms of expenditures.

At the same time the team of professors brought to Brazil by Casimiro started to lecture in the Army Technical School, in Rio de Janeiro, CTA's and ITA's facilities began to be built in the city of São José dos Campos. This city was small and its economy was rural, but Casimiro and his fellows predicted that, due to its location (between Brazil's biggest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and geography, it was a good place to be the berth of the aeronautics industry in Brazil. They turned out to be right, since about only 20 years later a company called EMBRAER, nowadays the third largest commercial jet manufacturer in the world, would flourish there, created and run by ITA's alumni.

In 1950 ITA's basic facilities were finished and its first students moved there, to finish the courses they started in the Army's facilities. Despite the fact ITA was run and maintained mostly by the Air Force, most of its students were civilians. That was a key point in the "Smith Plan", that ITA should form civilian engineers, to aid in the development of the Brazilian industry, specially the aeronautical one. Over the years a larger percentage of ITA's revenues began to come directly from the government. Nowadays the Air Force contributes with an amount that is somewhat proportional to the number of military students at ITA.

Undergraduate courses

*Aeronautical Engineering
*Civil-Aeronautical Engineering
*Computer Engineering
*Electronic Engineering
*Mechanical-Aeronautical Engineering

Graduate Programs

* Aeronautical & Mechanical Engineering
* Aeronautical Infrastructure Engineering
* Electronic & Computer Engineering
* Physics

Military career

Due to ITA's strong connection with the Air Force, the undergraduate students have the choice to become part of the military (as engineering officers) or keep their status as civilians, as members of the reserve, when they apply. About 20% of the students admitted in the institute follow the military career, starting to receive paychecks and wearing uniforms at the beginning of their 3rd year of school. Most of the students follow a civilian career, pursuing jobs in the market in Brazil or abroad, as they graduate.

During their first year at ITA, the undergraduate students are required to attend a military preparation course once a week, and receive monthly cost-of-living allowances for it during this period. For the male students it also fulfills their obligatory military service, which all male citizens in Brazil are required to attend (although the majority of them are dismissed at presentation).

Numbers (undergraduate courses only)

* ITA is currently accepting between 120 and 130 undergraduate students per year.
* 9,080 students took ITA's admission exam in the year of 2003, and about 8,000 in 2004. [ [http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/educacao/ult305u13918.shtml Folha Online - Educação - Cai número de inscritos no exame do ITA - 09/10/2003 ] ] That means there were about 70 applicants per vacancy or that only about 1,5% of the applicants were accepted.
* About 4,600 engineers graduated from ITA, since its foundation.
* EMBRAER alone, which was created by ITA's undergraduate alumni and currently employs hundreds of engineers from ITA, generated a positive net export balance of $1.529 billion dollars in 2005 [ Anuário de Comercio Exterior, 2006, Ed. Análise - http://www.analise.com] , over 150 times the yearly investment made in ITA by the Brazilian Government.
* By the time ITA was created, its home town, São José dos Campos, had about 44,000 inhabitants and its economy was rural. Nowadays the city alone has more than 600,000 inhabitants, and more than 1,000,000 if the adjacent cities are included, and is one of the most important industrial and research poles in the country.

Admissions (undergraduate courses only)

As in most of Brazilian universities and colleges, admissions at ITA are made by means of a series of written exams, applied annually, called "vestibular". ITA's vestibular is composed of 5 exams, each on one of the following subjects: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Portuguese and English. The English exam is only eliminatory, meaning the candidates are only required to achieve a minimum result in order to be qualified. The other four exams are eliminatory and competitive, meaning the applicants with the higher average grade (the four tests have equal weights) will be selected.

Students are selected based exclusively on their grades in the exam, and will be distributed in the 5 available Engineering courses according to number of seats available for each course and the list of course preferences the student fills at the time of his application.

The subjects of the exams are covered in much greater depth and difficulty than the exams from other colleges and universities in Brazil, including all the top universities such as UNICAMP, UFSC or USP, what makes it a necessity for the student to be prepared specifically for ITA's entrance exam. That usually demands an extra year of study or more (students often take the test 3 or 4 years before being selected). Another Engineering college, maintained by the Army, Instituto Militar de Engenharia (Military Institute of Engineering - IME), have exams of similar difficulty, but with a smaller amount of candidates. Candidates usually prepare for both exams [http://www3.atarde.com.br/vestibular/entrevistas/interna.jsp?xsl=noticia.xsl&xml=NOTICIA/1008125.xml] , from ITA and IME, in a way that the majority of the candidates selected by ITA ends up being selected by IME as well. The vast majority of the candidates nowadays chooses to study at ITA, when approved in both schools, due to the civilian nature of ITA and its better renown in the market.

Course evaluation results

From the 1996 to 2003, the Brazilian government conducted yearly evaluation exams for every undergraduate course in Brazil. Written exams, specific to every different type of college course, were given to every student at the time of their graduation and the results were used to evaluate the quality of the college courses and schools in Brazil. These exams were called Provão ("big test", in English). Unfortunately, due to pressure from the privately owned colleges and universities in Brazil, whose students usually got poor grades in the exams, Provão was dropped after 2003 and the evaluations are now done only every 5 years and only a small percentage (about 5%) of the students, randomly picked, take the exam for a given type of course.

Based on the average grade obtained by the students course, every school was given a grade from 'A' to 'E' for each of its courses, with 'A' being the best. ITA was the only institution in Brazil to have obtained only 'A's in all the years of Provão, for all of its courses [ [http://www.resultadosenc.inep.gov.br/instituicao.action?inst=602 Inep - Enc - Provão ] ] . The Provão results are somewhat misleading, though, as the grades are given by ordering the average grades of the schools in a list and giving the label 'A' to a certain predefined number of schools, and so on. Therefore, two schools that were given the grade 'A' can have substantially different scores, and that is usually the case. The actual grades for each school are not announced by the government, but a list with the higher average grades in 2003 "leaked" and was published by the national magazine Veja [Veja, # 1.847, 31/03/2004] .

The published list showed that the courses of Electronic and Computer Engineering at ITA, which both took the exam of Electrical Engineering, attained the higher average grade of the whole Provão in 2003. Its students had an average grade of 79.6 of a total of 100. This average was about 5 point higher than IME's, the 2nd position for Electrical Engineering, with 75.2, about 14 points higher than the 3rd position, UFRGS, with 66.3 and about 17 point higher than renowned USP and UNICAMP with 62.7 and 62.2, respectively. It was about 24 points higher than the 10th position for this course. That is a relative difference of more than 40%. All ten schools published in the list attained an 'A' grade at Provão.

It has been know that in almost every year of Provão ITA's courses figured in either first or second place in its categories, usually competing with IME, both with some distance from the remaining schools. It is hard, though, to point references for such information, as it comes usually from unofficial sources or scattered news from journalists which had access to leaked information. [http://www.inep.gov.br/ INEP] , government institute which conducts these evaluations, publishes the results of all Provões at its [http://www.resultadosenc.inep.gov.br/ website] , but only shows the alphabetic grade and percentiles in which the students from the institution are (usually more than 90% of ITA's students figure between the top 25% grades in Provão). [ [http://www.resultadosenc.inep.gov.br/conceito.action?inst=602&cidade=49904&curso=10 Inep - Enc - Provão ] ] . In 2003 94,3% of ITA's Electronic and Computer Engineering students were between the 25% top grades of the exam.

In the first edition of ENADE for Engineering in 2005, the unfortunate and infrequent successor of Provão, ITA's Computer Engineering course once again achieved the highest grade of its category. For the ENADE the government is publishing the actual average grade of each school at INEP's website [ [http://www.resultadosenc.inep.gov.br/ Inep - Enc - Provão ] ] . The next ENADE exam for Engineering is scheduled to the held in 2 or 3 years.

Notable Alumni

In alphabetical order:

* Jorge Bittar, Brazilian Congressman (as of 2006).
* Luiz Eduardo Falco Correa, CEO, Oi/Brasil Telecom.
* Carlos Henrique Brito Cruz, former Dean, UNICAMP; Science Director, FAPESP.
* Frederico Fleury Curado, CEO, EMBRAER.
* Conrado Engel, Regional Director for Asia Pacific, HSBC.
* Emanuel Fernandes, Brazilian Congressman (as of 2006).
* Jean Paul Jacob, Research Leader and Visionary, IBM.
* Ned Kock, Professor of Information Systems, Texas A&M International University.
* Rogério César de Cerqueira Leite, experimental physicist and scientific leader.
* Carlos Henrique Moreira, CEO, Embratel.
* Edson Vaz Musa, President of the Board of Directors of Caloi. Also, former member of Rhône Poulanc Group Executive Committee, current member of the Board of Advisors of Natura, WEG Industries, TV Cultura, Alliance Française, amongst others.
* Marcos César Pontes - First brazilian astronaut;
* Walter Schalka, CEO, Votorantim Cimentos.
* Ozires Silva, Founder and former CEO, EMBRAER.
* Bernardo Szpigel, CFO, Suzano Papel e Celulose.
* Cassio Taniguchi, Brazilian Congressman (as of 2006).
* Humberto Henriques, V.P., Engineering, WorldSpace, Inc.

References

External links

* [http://www.ita.br/ingles/ingles.htm ITA homepage in English]