On Campus

For the second year now HSE Saint-Petersburg has been gladly welcoming students from UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, coming to improve their language skills and immerse themselves into the mysterious Russian culture. Last weekend this year’s group of UCL SSEES students have visited Velikiy Novgorod – the cradle of Russian statehood and a real architectural gem. Helen Fortescue-Poole shared her impressions of the trip and told us about her academic life at HSE Saint-Petersburg.

HSE has campuses in four cities, and HSE St. Petersburg opened five years after the main campus, in 1997. It has over 4200 students, over 300 faculty members and 100 researchers who focus on different frontline issues in economics, business, humanities, law and social sciences. Sergey Kadochnikov, Director of HSE in St. Petersburg told The HSE Look about what the university has achieved, about its international and domestic partners as well as its development plans.

For Hoang Thanh Tung, who recently earned his bachelor’s degree at the Institute of International Languages - Vietnam National University, the decision to pursue a Master’s degree in the Faculty of Business and Management at HSE is in some ways a homecoming. Although coming most recently from Hanoi, Vietnam, he was born in Russia and spent much of his time growing up in the country, living with his parents in both Moscow and Ufa.

HSE has started distributing bank cards to its first-year students. If you are an international student on a Russian govenment scholarship (quota) you are eligible for such a card. On September 22, the first scholarships will be transferred via these cards. The schedule for the distribution of bank cards is presented below.

The Centre will include a swimming pool, a climbing wall, a gym, as well as dedicated space for basketball, tennis, badminton and other sports. The plan is to build the three-storey venue of almost 12,000 sq.m in under two years.

After turning down two offers of admission to universities in the United Kingdom, Rifki Zulkarnaen decided to accept a scholarship offer to attend the Master’s programme at HSE’s School of Asian Studies.

On September 8, a survey of HSE international students enrolling in 2017 was launched. The goal of the survey is to learn more about our new students, their educational background, choice of university and the challenges they faced during the application process.

Orientation sessions for new international students were held during the last two weeks of August at HSE Moscow. More than 200 exchange students from 80 countries will be spending the autumn semester taking courses in various HSE faculties. During the orientation, they learned about academic matters, administrative and safety issues, took a tour of HSE library, and attended roundtable discussions on life in Moscow and culture shock.

Samrat Sil is a recent graduate of the English-taught Master's programme in Applied and Interdisciplinary History ‘Usable Pasts’ at HSE St. Petersburg. David Datmar, a native of Ghana, decided to join the programme to help him prepare for eventual study at the PhD level, which he plans to undertake soon at the University of Oxford. Both gentlemen were recently awarded certificates of recognition for their role as ambassadors contributing to the university’s internationalization agenda.

The HSE St Petersburg Buddy Club has officially become a section of the Erasmus Student Network (ESN). The buddy club is a student organization and its main aim is helping international students adapt to their new lifestyle in Saint Petersburg and to their studies at the Higher School of Economics. Club members meet international students when they arrive, take them to the students' new home, explain how to use the underground, help buy a sim card, open a bank account and assist with other important tasks which students may find difficult to handle not knowing the Russian language. Additionally, the club also organizes educational and entertaining activities, trips to theatres, cultural events, Russian film evenings, etc.