Education news at HSE University

On July 22, the HSE CREATIVE HUB space hosted the ‘AGREED’ street art festival. This is the first collaboration between HSE Art and Design School students and the CHAIN ​​community. The event participants learned how street art changes the urban environment and also created their own artifacts in the form of special stickers and stencils.

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.

HSE University’s Graduate School of Business has hosted the defence of the ‘Sustainable Development Practices’ term papers with an emphasis on the ESG agenda. First-year students of the Master’s programmes ‘Marketing: Digital Technology and Marketing Communications’ and ‘Retail Management’ presented group consulting projects on solving real-world cases with social and/or environmental issues from partner companies of the E+Change programme. This is the third year of this unique project between the GSB and E+Change, and is continuing to attract more and more participating companies.

In early July, HSE Faculty of Computer Science held the 2nd Summer School on Entrepreneurship. It was organised by the faculty Centre for Internships, Projects and Entrepreneurshiptogether with Tinkoff Bank, and industry partners including Yandex, Sber Student and Otkritie Bank. More than 40 students from the Faculty of Computer Science and other HSE faculties took part in the school.

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.

A joint department with the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has opened at the Faculty of Computer Science (FCS). Leading mathematicians from the Steklov Institute will be involved in the department’s operations. The partnership aims to leverage the educational and research potential of the two institutions to train highly qualified specialists.

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.