Jose Mizael Rivera Valencia is a Mexican/American student of Industrial Engineering at Texas Tech University in the USA, country that he has been living since he was a child. He did an internship here in Brazil at Perfilados Belém, a company based in Curitiba that works with metallurgic products and metal plates.

Now that he finished his exchange program, we met with Jose to learn more about the experience he had during his staying in Curitiba, you can  watch his interview  or check it out below:

How was your learning experience here in Brazil?

My experience here has been really good, I do most of the stuff that I do the theory in school. The stuff I learn in school, I practically have to do here which is awesome. I’m actually doing what I was taught in school so I get to do the management of most of the production and know which worker is working on what machine and what product will be done first.

Did you notice changes on yourself?

I feel like I’m more open to new cultures and it made me more open minded about different people, like no one is better than no one. We all are just different and I appreciate that. I feel different, I feel like when I go back to the USA I’m g deal with people in a different way. I feel like before I was really closed minded and now I’m open minded and I appreciate a lot of stuff now.

Can you tell us about the cultural aspects of the exchange program?

I made a lot of friends here and it is awesome because everyone has different lives in different countries so now I get to know a lot of different cultures, not just Brazilian but like European, Asian, all of it, so I really enjoyed here.

We also interviewed Gisele Moro Dalabona  from Perfilados Belém, to know how was the experience of receiving Jose in the company and luckily we received a positive answers from her:

The experience we had with the intern was very interesting. We opened up this opportunity because we wanted to bring new ideas and do something different in the company, like a new vision, and it was very interesting because he added up a lot of things for our knowledge, also for the internal processes, the whole team became more motivated with a foreigner here, because this gives more status to the company, so it was a very interesting experience that we had here.