International students are beginning to arrive at HSE University for the new academic year. Among them are students from Indonesia. Some of them even had a chance to take their parents on a tour of the campus. How does one become an HSE University student? What do the university’s venues have to offer? What is it like to live in Moscow? The new arrivals shared their first impressions with the HSE News Service.

The English-taught Master's programme ‘Master of Data Science’ run by the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and its industrial partner, Yandex, brings together students from more than 30 countries. The programme is implemented completely online. Among the graduates of the second intake of the programme are Calvin Tee from Singapore and Lyubov Sharaborina from Moscow, Russia.

The IT industry is rapidly developing and incorporating new professions. Zoya Mazunina and Arina Mosyagina, linguists with Seldon and graduates of the HSE University Fundamental and Applied Linguistics programme, met with university applicants to talk about the computer linguist profession, issues of automatic language processing, and how linguists use the knowledge they gain at HSE University.

Through its Mirror Laboratories project, HSE University develops collaborations with academic institutions across the country. Today, it includes 22 ongoing projects in partnership with 20 universities in mathematics, computer science, economics, sociology, biology, history and many other fields. Marina Litvintseva, Director for Advanced Research at HSE University, coordinates international and mirror laboratory projects. In this year’s second issue of HSE LooK, she talked about the development of mirror laboratories and the future of the project.

Researcher Anastasia Dubnovitskaya of HSE University has studied the impact of social comparison on the level of Russians' pay satisfaction. The study used data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey — HSE University (RLMS-HSE) from 2002 to 2018. It turned out that the main contribution to Russians' pay satisfaction is the difference between their actual pay and the average wages of the reference group — people with similar characteristics. The size of one's own wages was of secondary importance.

Students of the Bachelor’s in Business Administration are working on a project to improve the efficiency of laboratory work at Voskresensk Mineral Fertilizers. In their six months of working with the company, they have conducted a full study of analytical control schedules, identified the most labour-intensive processes and types of laboratory analysis, and taken part in a poster session in July.