Education news at HSE University

'Baltic practice' summer school is an international interdisciplinary research platform that brings together students, professors, instructors, experts and prospective students for intensive professional interaction in an environment where all participants are treated as equals.

Over the course of six weeks, students from 12 countries, including South Korea, China, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, the U.S., Norway and others, will attend lectures, participate in seminars and master classes, and study Russian under the supervision of leading HSE instructors.

On June 27, the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies signed a cooperation agreement. The groundwork for the agreement had been laid over a period of several months, since December 2013, when a delegation from the Institute first visited the HSE St. Petersburg campus.

Carol Myford, associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In her research, she focuses on scoring issues in large-scale performance and portfolio assessments. Outside of academia, she has considerable experience working in government, business and industry. She spoke with the HSE news service about her research interests, the new summer school organized by the Institute of Education in the HSE ( 9-15, July, 2014) devoted to ’Test Development in Psychology and Education’, and her impressions of teaching in Moscow.

On July 25, the World Final of the International Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), took place in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The HSE was represented at the competition by a team of graduates – Vyacheslav Alipov, Mikhail Kolupayev, and Alexander Kuprin – from the master's programme of HSE’s Joint Department with Yandex, which is part of the Faculty of Computer Science's School of Applied Mathematics and Information Science. The team took home the bronze medal, finishing in 10th place.

From June 28 to July 5, the ‘Baltic Practice 2014’ summer school will take place in Zelenogorsk near St. Petersburg. The school’s topic this year is ‘Europe in Russia: Business, Culture, Values’. The aim of the event is to address the cultural, social and ideological constructs that were created in cooperation with Europe and have become an integral part of Russian culture and identity.

students and beginning entrepreneurs have received training at the HSE Business Incubator over the past five years. 

Tracy McDonald is a professor of Russian and Soviet History at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. In 2011, her first book, Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011. Currently she is conducting research for a book titled Behind the Iron Bars: A History of Soviet Zoos. She presented a lecture ‘Saving Beauty: Moscow and Leningrad Zoos during the Second World War’ in the HSE, Moscow and kindly agreed to answer a few questions for the HSE news service.