There is a new reality for the Brazilian automotive sector. Its products/services have to compete in price and quality with similar foreign products, both in the national and in the international market. This forces the organizations settled in Brazil, be them Brazilian or not, to assimilate and to continually develop new technologies as well as products/services, aiming to reduce costs without losing quality, and thus keep competitive in an ever increasingly globalized market.
It is not difficult to witness nations and organizations that take the leadership in certain market segments thanks to an effective management of the resources available and mainly to a staff counting on highly qualified professionals to perform their duties.
The goal of the Specialization Program in Automotive Engineering is to form, to update and to qualify higher level professionals to deal with industrial products/services and processes of the automotive sector, providing comprehensive vision and competence to face the different technical and management problems, characteristic in the sector.
The program has an hour load of 372 learning hours (14 disciplines), and the maximum span of time for completing the program is two and a half years. 48 lesson hours distributed in two compulsory disciplines, 324 in optional disciplines. The lessons are on Fridays, from 18h30 to 22h30, and on Saturdays, from 8h00 to 13h00, totaling 9 hours every weekend. Each discipline is offered along four weekends, intercalating them with two-discipline “packets”. The lessons are taught at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Escola Politécnica of USP, located in the campus of Cidade Universitária (University City), São Paulo.
The student must also write an individual monograph, which will be assessed by a board of professors. The theme of the monograph has to be related to Automotive Engineering, trying to focus on the solution of a real problem in the company.
Professors Paulo Carlos Kaminski and Marcelo Massarani, from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Escola Politécnica of USP are in charge of the program coordination. The teaching staff, composed mostly by PhDs in Engineering, counts on professors of the University of São Paulo and by invited Experts, all of them with effective professional actuation in the automotive sector and in engineering teaching.
It is a formal Specialization Program of the University of São Paulo and, therefore, the students who conclude it will be granted a Certificate of Expertise in Automotive Engineering, granted by the University of São Paulo, internationally acknowledged as the best Research University in Brazil.