Education

HSE University’s Support and Career Centre for International Students and Alumni has held orientation sessions for incoming international students. During the meetings, the centre’s experts explained the visa and migration support available, talked about extracurricular student life, and gave tours of the campus and the city.

In August, the HSE University-St Petersburg Summer School came to an end. The participants attended courses in political science, Russian, and finance given by professors of HSE University-St Petersburg, got to know the city, and saw the sights as part of the cultural programme. The summer school hosted students from nine countries: China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Uzbekistan and Russia.

At the start of August, HSE University held the tenth annual Summer University. This year’s programme took the form of a workshop on urban studies. The participants attended four courses from HSE University faculty and invited experts and worked on their own projects to develop a cultural heritage site. Jung Woo Lee, from South Korea, shares his impressions of the Summer University.

HSE University continues to develop its international relations with the best Asian universities. At the request of Thammasat University (Thailand), a special short-term educational programme in ‘Russian Language and Culture’ has been created at the HSE St Petersburg International Office.

From July 4–8, the 14th Summer School ‘Methods and Tools for Analysing Social Networks’ was held by the International Laboratory for Applied Network Research (ANR Lab). The dissemination of knowledge about the most recent methods of network analysis is one of the goals of the laboratory. Social network analysis is an interdisciplinary field that studies networks of interactions between different objects (such as people, organisations, institutions, countries, words in texts, texts on the internet) and identifying hidden patterns within them.

The International Preparatory Year programme held its graduation ceremony in July. This academic year, 125 students from 50 countries were enrolled in the programme. They will continue their studies at Russian universities, most of them pursuing bachelor's and master's programmes at HSE University. The graduation was organised as a quest, where the students were able to demonstrate their achievements in learning the Russian language. Graduates from Ecuador, Syria, and Mexico shared their impressions with the HSE News Service, Deputy Director Polina Shanko talked about plans for the coming year, and mathematics teacher Vladimir Gordin gave his advice to future students.

On July 3, the HSE University building on Pokrovka hosted the graduation ceremony of the Master’s in Applied Statistics with Network Analysis (MASNA). The programme, which trains students to use modern approaches in data and network analysis, is taught fully online in English. We spoke to Jiaxuan Wang, Sergio Camposortega, and Iris Cilenšek, three international students who came to Moscow for the graduation ceremony. The recent graduates shared their thoughts about the online format and finally meeting their classmates in person.

HSE University in St Petersburg continues its strategic programme to develop educational and research ties with universities in the Asia-Pacific region. At the request of Thammasat University (Thailand), a special short-term educational programme in ‘Russian Language and Culture’ has been created at the HSE St Petersburg International Office.

Ugo Cavitte, a 22-year-old student from the north of France, is currently in his second year of studying for a Master's degree in Pedagogy at the HSE Institute of Education. In addition, he teaches French as a foreign language at HSE's School of Foreign Languages and online. In a recent interview, Ugo shared his experience of studying at HSE and teaching French, as well as his advice for those who want to learn a foreign language better and faster. He also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of online learning, and shared his love for Russian cuisine and culture.