You're a dad now

Just before the start of the second semester at Unicamp, we found out my girlfriend was pregnant. That forced us to quickly rework our plans. I went back to Campinas and continued my master’s, but I had already started talking to my advisor about how to handle the situation from the middle of 1997 onward. The master’s program had two semesters of coursework, and the last two were basically dedicated to developing and writing the thesis. We agreed I would do that second part from Belo Horizonte. We also settled on the thesis topic: a classification scheme for electronic payment systems, and I took my qualifying exam on that subject.

In the middle of my second semester at Unicamp (the first semester of 1997), we got married in Gisele’s hometown in Minas Gerais and headed off for our honeymoon in a beach town on the coast of São Paulo (state), with a little pit stop in Campinas. There was a course in the master’s program called Computing Seminars, with no exams, where the only requirement was attendance. Since Campinas was more or less on the way, we slept there one night; I went to the seminar (Gisele came with me) and, from there, we continued on to the beach for a proper honeymoon.

In the middle of the year, I packed my things, stuffed everything into my Uno Mille, said goodbye to the people at the república, and hit the road. We got an apartment in Belo Horizonte and started organizing the move and the furniture for the baby’s room. We moved into the new apartment and, while Gisele finished her undergraduate degree, I kept working on my master’s thesis.

Around this same time, an opening for a faculty position at the Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) came up, in the computing area. It was one of the few public competitive hiring processes for a faculty position at a university that required only an undergraduate degree. UFLA had just been upgraded from a school of agriculture into a federal university. The university president had ambitious plans for modernization, and one of the first steps was creating a computing program so the university could hire specialists in computing.

Since we were starting a family, it seemed important to look for something more stable than just living off a master’s scholarship. The UFLA position came up as an excellent opportunity. I prepared a bit: there was a list of ten topics, with a written exam and a lecture for the hiring committee. Gisele helped me a lot with that preparation, even making slides for several of the possible lecture topics, so I’d be ready for whatever was drawn.

The exam lasted two days. I stayed at a cheap hotel in Lavras and took the tests. By coincidence, the same topic (sorting algorithms) was drawn for both the written exam and the lecture. For me, that was great, because it was a subject I was very comfortable with. I’d even brought a deck of cards to use during the lecture to demonstrate the algorithms, but I ended up forgetting it and used only the slides I had prepared. A funny detail is that the external member of the committee was a professor from UFMG whose classes I had taken (Prof. Monteiro), and he still remembered me. In the end, I gave him a ride back to Belo Horizonte. Even without the deck of cards, I passed: I came in first in the competition. All that was left was to wait for the university to call me.

A couple of days after I got back to Belo Horizonte, Pedro was born. At the same time, we had to adjust to life with a new baby, prepare the paperwork for the new job, and negotiate when I would need to be in Lavras to start working. Since the university operated in semesters, it was informally agreed that I could keep living outside Lavras until the start of the 1998 academic year. In that period, I kept writing the thesis (with Pedro on my lap), exchanging emails with my advisor, and making occasional trips to Campinas for face-to-face meetings. The folks at the república let me sleep there when I went to Campinas.

The thesis was moving forward more slowly than I would have liked, but there was progress, including publications at several conferences. Until the day finally came to move to Lavras, but that’s a story for another chapter.