doubling citizenship

Once, during a Chemistry test at school, my teacher called me on her table after observing me for a while. She asked if I had some family relation with Portugal, because according to her I sit, write, talk and look as a Portuguese girl. I was 15 and I was so surprised by the question that the only thing I could answer was “yes, ma’am”. I knew my both grandparents, who have always lived right next to me, came from the other side of the ocean during the 50's to run away from the Second World War. A year after that episode, my mother started a long process to provide me a double citizenship and a European passport that would facilitate my travels in the future.

Later, in 2013, I finally traveled abroad to the United States for an exchange program with five other Brazilian students. We prepared ourselves for the great day of the flight during almost a whole semester, and at that time I started wondering what is to be a Brazilian, Portuguese or from any other country according to the rest of the world and its rules and agreements.

I paid US$10 after answering some simple questions on internet to get my Visa. My friends traveled to São Paulo, each one with a legal responsible, to pass through many interviews and a complex documentation checking. They spent more than a R$1.000 per person to complete their processes, and for me it was senseless. We grow up in the same country, talked the same language and shared the same culture, but my grandparents were born in Europe and that would give me the right of going abroad easily.

Then I started searching for the logic of international agreements. I felt a necessity to understand how decisions made in organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union and the BRICS group would affect the everyday life of peoples all over the world. Participating in several Models UN during High School, I could play the role that nations representatives do in every single assembly in the UN, writing resolutions and changing lives of huge amounts of people by some hours of debate and a single document.

That is what makes me want to go beyond. Study in the United States would provide me the perfect educational conditions, considering not only the academic area but also the cultural and social experience it is to be at a great university. Make the difference is my only objective, and I am sure that being Portuguese, Brazilian and me are the abilities I need to be able to do that.