The status of an institution is also the result of the quality of its graduates, supported by their professional and personal success.
One of the designs of the University is to monitor closely the professional path of the Alumni, to better follow the results of their education and to better adjust the academic offer to the evolution of the labour market. The University is also committed to the employability of its graduates, by bringing employers closer to young graduates, using tools such as the Bolsa de Emprego (Job Offers).
At the same time, the development of a culture of identity and sense of belonging to the UMinho community is another assumed commitment, and Alumni’s role on fulfilling that commitment is vital.
Testimonials
"It is in Architecture that we translate space into sensations. More than the act of designing functionality, it allows us to draw feeling in the places. To study Architecture means transversality. It consists in constant questioning:" How“ and "why", in a discussion of perceptions, establishing dialogues even in the silence of places!"
Ana Luísa Loureiro, student of the 4th year of MIARQ / EAUM
"The intellectual openness of EAUM regarding architecture characterizes its identity based on collective standard values in the approach to the theoretical / project problems. As regards academic education, I emphasize the awareness that self-learning is fundamental in the personal construction of the architect, as well as self-criticism, the best instrument in the development of a design methodology, starting with a mental deconstruction on the concept of space until a final methodological validation, of the individual capacity to theorize / design an inherent problem of architecture."
André Cardoso, 5.º ano / 2013
"I will strongly affirm: to be an architect is to be a student of architecture, for it requires constant restlessness, an incessant search for the measure, which tends never to stabilize, and an uninterrupted openness of mind to build space accurately. The School of Architecture of the University of Minho teaches us to absorb architecture as much as to project it in a never-univocal way. Its building is a metaphor for the character of its teaching, as it reads the tradition of a Portuguese architecture that proclaims modernity, an awareness of its complete meaning in time, or a body of rooms and offices that look glazed over the past, rests on the ground in contact with Man. As a daily observer of this, I won’t be able to answer unequivocally what is architecture, because its craft / building does not dissociate itself from human activity. But to the question of being a student of architecture, this school, in an analogous identity with its building, do not advance answer, draw a course."
João Pedro Silva, 5.º ano / 2012
"I do remember the intoxicating and unique feeling of being part of something new and very special: the creation of a new Architecture course. The screen was blank waiting to be filled and all the ways were possible. Then, we were unified by the same vocation, the same ambition, the same desire to explore and follow the paths that were given to discover by people also in love. What I experienced in the former Autonomous Department of Architecture (now School of Architecture) opened my eyes to a whole new world. I fell in love with the immense, unique and timeless "power" of the human gesture on a virgin palette of a landscape, by the way in which it determined and determines every step of our history, by the way it manifests and aggregates the most varied arts. And all this happens in the buildings that surround us, in the music we hear, in the movies we see, in the lens of a photographer, in the trait of an artist. For me it was definitely a joyful and important personal discover, and a prosperous meeting."
Susana Sousa, Alumnus — Arquiteta na Foster and Partners (London)
