The Annual International Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence 2022
Berkeley Prize 2022

Beatriz Da Costa Gotoda - Bio

Hi, my name is Beatriz and I'm an undergraduate architecture and urban planning student from Brazil.

My decision to pursue this field was a gut-invoked one. I had always been interested in politics and society, and I was aware of my internal drive to collaborate in finding solutions to the most pressing issues humanity currently faces. I thought a career in politics was the best way to do this, but when I had to pick a major, I felt limited by this scope. At school, I had always felt closer to the themes seen in humanities classes, but that never kept me from exercising my intense creative streaks through art and writing, and from being highly curious about the physical and biological worlds. So when I was faced with this enormous decision, I realized that politics was only one of the fields I gravitated towards, and that university was a tremendous opportunity that required more than an affinity-based choice from me. I realized that, if I was to leave university with the necessary experience to find the solutions to the problems that intrigue me the most, my decision had to consider the totality of my being at past and present and its potentials for the future, that it had to provoke more than just one part of me to seek and produce knowledge.

For these reasons, instinctively, in a matter of seconds, I changed my mind and decided I was going to pursue a Bachelor of Architecture. At that point, I had not much awareness of why I had made this instant choice, but since then it has become clear: I have come to see architecture as a field of far and vast reaches, that can and should encompass many other fields, and, as a result, I see its absolute potential to provide the necessary tools for a more holistic comprehension of the human experience and, consequently, of how we may overcome its difficulties.

University of Melbourne - Bachelor of Design (Architecture), 2017-19 University of São Paulo - Bachelor of Architecture and Urban Planning, 2021-2025 (transferred)


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Beatriz da Costa Gotoda, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning - University of São Paulo, São Paulo Brazil
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