LEIC

Licenciatura em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores, the graduate course I finished at IST in '94 (the first graduate year). The course, sponsored by Prof. José Tribolet, started in January 15th 1990 due to delays resulting from a teacher strike, and the resulting compaction of semesters turned that year into a lot of folks' personal Vietnam.

The remainder of the course turned out to be somewhat of an endurance test as well, as the curricula for several graduates and MSc degrees was sliced and diced to fit a standard 5-year course in near-realtime as the first batch of students jumped through the various hoops.

The result was an extremely tight-knit bunch of people who learned to work as a team the hard way, and who as a result still keep somewhat in touch these days.

I was editor of the course newspaper (steadfastly avoiding any ties to the IST Students' Association of the time), sat in on a few pseudo-academic committees/lobbies/raging arguments, etc. related to adjusting the curricula on the fly, and eventually helped push through (and designed the covers for) the class yearbook and its accompanying caricature booklet (one A4, the other in A5 format):

The booklet cover depicts some of the "usual suspects" - see if you can figure out which is me.

The class of '94 has a bit of global reach, with folk working in the UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Macau, and even the USA, and I'm told the latter years did just as well (I get the occasional e-mail from other alumni working at Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, IBM, etc.)

These days the course is split between two different campuses, with slightly different curricula (and probably undergoing some re-structuring for the Bologna Reform).