Hello guys!

Here speaking is your "brand new" friend from Brazil - a 23 year old girl who has just joined the Global Campus team. I graduated in Industrial Engineering in December 2008 (in Brazil) and I came to the UK to help the team with Marketing Research and related (or not!) subjects. A bonus for my job here is the honour (and also the responsibility) of having a say in our blog. Yeah! Great, isn’t it?

I decided to start with the basics in humankind: free will and choices. Don’t worry, I am an Engineer above all, so I am not going as deep as Plato or Nietzsche…

Last year I attended a lecture about "The life worth living". At the beginning I thought it was going to be boring, full of vague advice and all those clichés that sell millions of self-help books every year. But then I realised the lecturer was not there to give answers and advice on how to live our lives, but to ask us (the right) questions and make us think over the way we were leading our lives.

Some points he made were:
1. A life worth living is not in the past, because everything has changed, nor in the future, which is only an illusion, but in the present, when things really exist.
2. Men are not like other animals or things that have their existence determined by their nature, each man can choose their own life
3. There is no universal rule for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – each individual has to find what is good or bad for him/her and the clue to know if that is the right path is simple: happiness.

Summarizing: what makes you happy now? This personal answer is a life worth living. Love the feel of being on a stage performing? Be an actor! Can’t imagine your life without Math? Go for it!

Be sure that what you do gives you pleasure and fulfilment. May sound too simple, but in practice it is not. So often we find ourselves doing some things that don’t please us because of a (uncertain, to be honest) future, because we have made a decision in the past that is no longer good or because we want to please someone else (although it is hard to admit). Don’t be afraid to say ‘no, thanks’ and ‘yes, of course’ when you are willing to do so!

Education is related to choices, to a life worth living. The course and university you choose must mean loads of happiness. Tough times may come (and they will!) but when you do something meaningful for you, you will be able to overcome it.