Interdepartmental Program in Oil & Gas at PUC-Rio

Abstract

The Interdepartmental Program in Oil & Gas at PUC-Rio seeks excellence in the training of its undergraduate and postgraduate students, offering complementary training that enables them to face the challenges of the oil and energy sector. Basic and professional training in mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering (electronics and telecommunications) is complemented by subjects in the area of oil, gas and renewable energies, with an emphasis on the transportation, exploration & production and biofuels. This allows students who complete the program to become readily able to work in the industrial sector immediately after completing their courses. Three teaching and research units at PUC-Rio participate more actively in the program. These are the Departments of Mechanical, Electrical, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. However, ANP scholarships are accessible to all engineering students who are willing to study the complementary specialized disciplines offered by the program as well as develop their final projects, dissertations or theses on topics within these specializations. These themes are aligned with the Research and Innovation projects developed at the university. In the case of undergraduate students, scholarship recipients are selected based on academic performance. For postgraduate scholarship holders, the eligibility criteria follow the processes established by PUC-Rio's postgraduate programs.Therefore, professionals who go through the PRH experience have a broader theoretical and practical foundation that combines their area of specialty (Mechanical, Electrical, Civil or Environmental) with experience in industrial topics. We believe that the engineers and researchers trained by the PRH will contribute to making the industry more dynamic and creative, and consequently, more innovative. The critical sense developed by professionals who have a broad training background, which combines knowledge from inside and outside the industry, will help identify processes and procedures that can be improved, contributing to efficiency gains. This is especially important in the context of global warming and energy transition. In addition, the PRH has become an important research sponsorship program and contributes to making up for the reduction in the number of scholarships offered to the University in recent years. For PRH 10.1, this is immediately observed for the master's (MSc) and postdoc (PDSC) scholarships, for which demand has become greater than supply, and all scholarships are implemented. (AU)