International Week at the HSE in Saint Petersburg

On February 10-14, 2014, HSE International Week will take place at the HSE in Saint Petersburg for the first time. Seventeen students from more than 10 countries, including Norway, Austria, Finland, China, Great Britain, and Germany, have applied to participate in the event.  Among those participating will be both students coming to Saint Petersburg specially for the event and exchange students already studying at the HSE and other Russian universities.

The 'international week' is a new format for informing foreign students about study opportunities at the HSE. As part of the event, students will learn about the campus, educational programmes, short programmes, and summer schools. In a sense, it’s an HSE-Saint Petersburg ‘open house’ for foreign students that will last a whole week long.

International Week will be held for prospective students on February 10-14, 2014, during the break between the two modules of the HSE-Saint Petersburg’s annual winter school. These events are being combined so that winter school participants can take part in some International Week activities.

The event programme includes presentations on the international master’s programmes in Sociology and History; master classes given by HSE professors; lectures by invited speakers from Tulane University (USA) and the University of Jyväskylä (Finland); as well as a diverse cultural programme prepared with the help of the HSE-Saint Petersburg Student Council. The international Master’s Programme in Comparative Social Research, implemented in cooperation with the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, will start in 2014. The second educational programme that will be presented during International Week is the Master’s Programme in Applied and Interdisciplinary History, which will start in 2015 at the HSE Faculty of History in Saint Petersburg.

Sergey Kadochnikov, Director of the HSE Campus in Saint Petersburg, says that such promotional events for foreign students offer opportunities to convey first-hand information about the HSE’s educational programmes, and to introduce HSE campus life and the city to the participants. They, in turn, will play the role of HSE ‘ambassadors’ at their universities and will, he believes, be glad to tell others about their Russian experience.

All the campus’s faculties and students will actively participate in International Week. One of the participants, a student from Norway, is researching the growth in the attractiveness of Russian education for Norwegian students; thus, International Week will also be a platform for research.