The advantages of ITMO Track

According to previous year’s study by the Russian State Social University, more than half of all Russians work at jobs that are unrelated to their degrees. A lot of the study’s subjects say that they either had their parents choose their university for them, or just went along with their friends’ choices. Picking a program is also tough, since it is often impossible to know which skills you will acquire and which career paths will be available after graduation. 

“According to our research, more than 30% of all students say that they regret their choice after two to three years of studying. To learn why, we interviewed a lot of highschool students and discovered the primary issue. It turns out, they really have no idea as to what it is they will actually learn and where they can work after graduation,” says Svyatoslav Oreshin, the head of ITMO’s Learning Analytics Center and the ITMO TRACK team.

ITMO TRACK is designed to answer these exact questions. This service lets its users take a closer look at every educational program to find out what subjects are included, how they relate to each other, how much time will be spent on each one, what exams and tests the students will be required to pass, and what the skill set of the program’s graduates will be like. 

Ultimately, the system will create an educational trajectory in accordance with its users’ goals, making prospective students able to trace their path all the way from enrollment to graduation. 

How to use it

You can get your personalized list of educational programs in three easy steps:

1. Pick a career you are aiming for. As of now, there are 24 options available, including marketing specialist, frontend developer, ecologist, biotechnologist, and others.

2. Read up on your chosen career and set your salary expectations. You can choose any value, for instance, entry-level salary or the pay of a specialist with about five years’ worth of work experience.  

3. Select up to five professional, general-purpose, or soft skills. A possible selection can look like this: programming in Python and C++, mobile app and web development, as well as presentation and public speaking skills. There are pre-made sets of skills, but you can also create your own using a special editor.

Based on your choices, ITMO TRACK makes a ranking of the best-suited Bachelor’s programs. Thus, the first option will always be the program that has the most overlap with the prospective student’s stated career goals, with other possible options ranked lower. This is especially useful in the event that you did not score enough on the exams to apply for your first choice, but can still get into a suitable program.

After getting your results, you can explore any of the suggested programs in detail.

How it works

When developing the service, its authors analyzed each of ITMO’s Bachelor’s programs and more than 3,000 academic disciplines, each with its own set of keywords. The algorithm works by processing user input and forming its recommendations based on these keywords, which serve as search tags. In total, more than 10,000 unique keywords were created.

Every set of tags was verified by the staff of the corresponding program. The team also contacted ITMO graduates and industry experts in order to more accurately determine which skills are in high demand on the job market.

Another specially designed algorithm is used to build career trajectories. It works by matching the user's selection of skills with the keywords in the subject database, which includes both mandatory and optional subjects. The end result is an optimized curriculum consisting of subjects that have the most keywords in common with the prospective student’s input. 

For fear of confusing the users, the team behind the project compiled some tags into pre-set selections that have ready-to-use career trajectories and lists of skills. Users can share their trajectories to show their friends and family exactly what it is they will be doing at university.

Read also:

Admissions to Bachelor’s and Master’s Programs Now Open at ITMO

Upcoming features

The algorithm currently works only with Bachelor’s programs, but the team has plans to integrate Master’s programs into the service by next year.

As of right now, there are 24 Bachelor’s programs to choose from, including, for example, Computer Technologies: Programming and Artificial Intelligence, which has classes taught by employees of leading Russian tech companies and world champions in competitive programming, such as Andrey Stankevich, Gennady Korotkevich, Pavel Mavrin, and others. 

There are 76 Master’s programs at ITMO in a wide range of subjects: programming, AI, information security, robotics, physics, chemistry, biology, biotechnologies, ecology, energy, engineering sciences, economics and innovatics, humanities, and many more.

You can learn more about these programs here and submit your application here.