Since 2015, the Instituto TIM and the Brazilian Public School Math Olympics (OBMEP) have come together by means of the Instituto TIM-OBMEP Scholarships to enable young mathematical talents, from low-income families, to pursue Higher Education. In these five years, over 200 university students participated in the program. The first group of scholarship holders graduated in early 2019. Now, in the 2020 edition, another 50 students – 37 boys and 13 girls – have been selected to receive the monthly scholarship in the amount of BRL 1,200.
The 50 new scholarship holders are students in Computer Sciences (8), Engineering (19), Statistics (2), Physics (4), Mathematics (10) and Medicine (7). They started college this year at 25 public universities in the Northeast (23), Southeast (23), South (3) and North (1) regions.
The goal of the program is to contribute so that that talented young people are able to attend college and dedicate themselves to it full time, even without financial conditions and living far from large urban centers. In order to register, it is necessary to be a medalist of some edition of the OBMEP and to have been approved to start a degree at a public university in any of the courses determined in the regulation (Astronomy, Biology, Computer Sciences, Economics, Engineering, Statistics, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine and Chemistry).
In 2020, 754 young people applied for the Instituto TIM-OBMEP Scholarships. In the selection, aspects evaluated included the score of each candidate in the National High School Exam, the family income per capita and the distance between the university and the place of residence, among others. Of all the candidates eligible to receive the scholarship, 200 were pre-selected. An academic committee assigned grades to each of them, according to the priority for receiving the scholarship.
With the new selection, the number of young people currently receiving the Instituto TIM-OBMEP Scholarship comprises of 205 university students, most of them in the Southeast (93) and the Northeast (86) regions.
