Scholarship graduates from Junior Scientific Initiation: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

This study is the result of an experiment with high school students and their involvement in research projects in the academic environment. Therefore, the focus is on graduates of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), who were Bolsistas de Iniciação Científica Júnior (BICJ) in the Biblioteca Viva Project: Espaço de Apoio aos Processos de Ensino e de Aprendizagem. The research question is as follows: How does the Junior Scientific Initiation Program contribute (or not) to the academic lives of these high school graduates of a state school in Porto Alegre? Based on a qualitative textual discourse analysis carried out on the corpus created, three categories emerged: educational experiences, which describes the experiences by the scholarship holders over the course of High School and the project; transformative experiences, which has two subcategories: transformation of how they view themselves and social transformation, referring to the identification of the program’s contributions to the lives of the graduates; and factors related to the project, which contributed to continuing studies after High School, in the category building a life project.