If you intend to go to a grad school here, or work at a job which requires an undergrad education, you must have a Brazilian undergraduate degree, or validate your foreign undergraduate degree. I am currently going through this process and will give you some tips on how to do it.
First of all, you need to check if your foreign degree has a correspondent course in a public university over here. At least 70% of the classes taken have to match with those from the Brazilian course. Once you find a University with a similar degree, you can access the institution's website and check the required documents for the validation.
The institution analyzes these documents and decides if the degrees are compatible, then it gives you a Brazilian certification, which functions as a diploma from that institution.
Try not to do the validation process at USP. Although it is the biggest and most prestigious public university in Brazil, they are very bureaucratic and you will be going from office to office trying to find someone who has the right information for months. Their working hours are confusing and finding someone who can help you over the phone is impossible. And everyone to whom I talked told me the process can take up to 2 years and there is not much you can do if they decide your degree can't be validated. I suggest trying federal universities such as Unifesp or Ufabc. At Ufabc they let you take classes as a special student in case your validation is denied due to lack of classes, so you don't lose your money.
Usually, the documents needed for validation are: the undergrad diploma you want to validate, the corresponding transcript, the syllabus from all the classes you have taken or the course catalog, a letter stating that the foreign university is accredited (it can be issued by the accreditation institution), and a high school diploma. They may ask you to fill a form and provide some sort of ID.
The undergrad diploma, accreditation letter, transcript, and syllabus or course catalog must be authenticated by the Brazilian consulate from the country where they were issued. In order to do so, you should mail the documents to a Brazilian consulate with a US$ 5 money order per document and an already sealed and addressed envelop so they can send them back to you. You can find more information here. Make sure to send the documents to a consulate in the area from where your degree was issued. If you studied in NYC you must send them to the Brazilian Consulate in New York. If you send them to the one in Chicago, for example, they won't authenticate them.
You will also need to get a certified translation of your undergrad diploma, the accreditation letter and transcript. You can find a Brazilian certified translator here.
Now the only thing left is to pay the validation fee. In federal colleges, such as Ufabc, it costs R$ 1300 to validate your diploma. Each university has a different payment method and they usually have it explained in their website. After paying, you just need to take the documents and the receipt to the University you have chosen and hope for the best.
In Ufabc it takes 2 months for them to analyze and decide whether they will validate a diploma or not. As I said before, if they decide not to, you can take the missing classes as a special student over there and then get your validation. If the answer is yes, there is a R$100 fee to finalize the process, and then you should be good to go.
Here is the website from Ufabc explaining how they do the validation.
Good luck for all of you who are planning on doing this, I hope this helped!
