greatest challenge

March 31, 2026 · 2 min read

first exam outside my comfort zone

I was nearing the end of high school and watched all my friends leave town to take college entrance exams for medicine. that made me think: it would be cool to take an exam outside my comfort zone too, but in which field? that is how I landed on computing, more specifically, computer engineering. since I have always leaned toward slightly harder challenges, I decided I would try the entrance exam for the Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica (ITA) at the time.

ITA

for context, the Instituto Tecnológico da Aeronáutica (ITA) is an Air Force military institute that offers top-tier engineering programs, and it is known for Brazil's hardest entrance exam.

it was late 2015, and back then the ITA entrance exam ran for a full week, Tuesday through Friday: one exam per day, with twenty multiple-choice questions and ten of Physics, Mathematics, Portuguese/English, and Chemistry, in that order. I genuinely believed I could solve at least one question on the exam, but on the very first day of Physics I realized it was far beyond what I had imagined. what was supposed to be a week of exams where I might get in on the first try (if only) to a top engineering program became a week facing a challenge whose level was so out of scale I could barely even gauge it. at the same time, I knew that was really what I wanted for my life (pretty wild, right?).

a shift in perspective

that is when it really clicked. It felt as if my whole life as a student had been thrown away I even thought of myself as somewhat clever, able to crack a few interesting problems, but it was not what it seemed, and that is what ITA showed me. the worst part came right after the exams, when I met people who thought all of that was completely normal.

spoiler alert

years later, after studying in an ITA cohort, I realized how doable it actually was hahaha.