Trilha

Trilha started in 2024 from a question five of us kept coming back to: what was missing when we first arrived at the CI? The answer wasn't more theory — UFPB has plenty of that. It was practical exposure. Someone telling you what to actually learn first. A mentor who'd been through it. A real project to put on your resume. A network you'd actually use after graduation.

So Felipe Duarte, Nicholas Rodrigues, Guilherme Huther, Ícaro Mori, and I founded Trilha — a free, semester-long program for early-period students at the Centro de Informática. The pitch was simple: bring the things we wished we'd had in our first semesters, and bring them from people already in the industry.

The format is one cohort per semester. Weekly practical classes taught by monitors who already work as software engineers, ML researchers, and data scientists. The curriculum runs through Python, web development, data, and engineering fundamentals — all of it applied, all of it oriented toward what the job market actually expects. Every cohort ends with a real project built from scratch.

Around the classes sits the rest of the program. Each student is paired with a senior mentor for one-on-one calls throughout the semester — and the relationship is meant to continue after. Guest lectures from engineers, founders, and researchers. Thematic hackathons where students ship something in 48 hours.

Four cohorts in (2024.1 through 2025.2), the program has graduated 62 students, runs with 20+ active organizers, and stays 100% free for participants. Around 90% of alumni land tech jobs straight out of the program — many at the same companies their mentors came from. Projects coming out of Trilha include ClarIAr (LLM-powered accessibility), Pixelmind (AI video editing), and Praxis (personalized coding practice).

Trilha was never going to stay just Trilha. The model works, and the gap it fills isn't unique to UFPB. We're now organizing Momento — a broader mentorship movement built on the same DNA, already running across four public universities (UFPB, UFCG, UEPB, UFG) and growing. Same idea, bigger map. Pair students with mentors already in industry, keep it free, keep it student-run. We're going national.

And there's something even bigger coming behind it. More on that soon.

Live at otrilha.com and momento.sh.