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.

Every summer, HSE University students from various programmes have the opportunity to gain experience in their subject under real conditions. Second-year students of the Bachelor’s in Geography of Global Changes and Geoinformation Technology spent 24 days doing practical work in geoinformation technologies and spatial modelling, 17 of which were spent in the field.

The concept of Satanism originating from Roman Catholic sources continues to lack a rigorous social science interpretation. Satanism is sometimes believed to be a reflection of real-life problems faced by society and is sometimes considered a phenomenon in its own right that merits serious study. HSE doctoral student Oxana Mikhailova provides an overview of how the concept of Satanism is treated by different sociological theories and offers her commentary.

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.