Erica Cunha | Communication and Journalism

Erica Cunha

Communication and Journalism

“My name is Érica, I study Communication and Journalism. I always wanted Journalism, since I was little, I think that journalism, in addition to opening up to many areas, after I grew up I realized that journalism opened up to many areas, but when we are little, in my head it made a lot of sense because I can't be an astronaut but I can interview an astronaut.

Journalism gives you the opportunity to try out an area a little and be a little bit of everything. Thanks to our teachers we have a lot of contact with practical people, so having contact with a journalist with a 30-year career is very easy, we can talk, we can exchange ideas about this and I think Lusófona has helped me a lot in this, in seeing how the practical works, both with the work we do during the course, and when we have conferences to participate in, we have a lot of contact with professors, for example from the University of Barcelona.

A couple of weeks ago we had a great conference about journalism in Spain and the space for women in it, so it's very encouraging for us to see how journalism is still very much alive and working with it in practice is also quite cool. Before I came here, there was a lot of news in Brazil about xenophobia among Brazilian students at other universities and I was a little worried about arriving here and parachuting into a place where they wouldn't accept the way I spoke, the way I I wrote and I was quite surprised.

I didn't expect that I would receive the reception I did, both from the teachers, who were very understanding and helped me with whatever they needed to help me with, but they never changed the way I spoke or did anything. The newsmagazine project was quite remarkable, in several areas, positive and negative. We had to work a lot with teamwork and the project itself was very practical. They handed it over to us and we have to do it and move forward and we had to work a lot with editorial design. Many people have this ideal that journalism is either a TV with a microphone in your hand or it means writing a lot and sometimes it's not quite like that. In this project, we mainly had to work with photojournalism, we had to work with the editorial design of the magazine, so choosing color, typography, preparing those images in the best possible way.

The newsmagazine project was very interesting, writing, creating a magazine from scratch, from the production of content to the production of images and montages, this project was really cool. Yes, I recommend Lusófona. Lusófona is a great university, it has a very modern curriculum, I met a lot of people through here, the teaching staff is wonderful, I have nothing to complain about the teachers, they are very good and that's it. We work well with practical people, so I would advise a lot.”