Relationship Between Students and Educators at ITMO University

Disclaimer: I am a MSc student at the faculty of Applied Optics and will only be speaking from my own experience. The culture may vary from faculty to faculty as well as from person to person. However, feel free to extrapolate my experience to get a general feeling :)

ITMO University positions itself as a first non-classical university. Some of the values of the university are: respect for the individual, academic freedom and openness. As explained on the website, those values mean the following.

Respect for the Individual

We appreciate individuality, and try to see the unique traits in every person and help them grow and learn through providing opportunities for personal development and fulfilling their potential.

Academic Freedom

We have the freedom to exchange information, to choose, to implement our own ideas and personal plans while being aware and responsible for the consequences of our actions.

Openness

We are open to new ideas and people; we welcome change and are open to dialogue and collaboration.

Most of my experiences with educators in ITMO were the reflection of these values. Let me give you some example to make my point clear.

In the first year of MSc studies we had compulsory English classes. My English level was more advanced than the level (s) of the rest of the group. When it was clear that the tasks were too easy for me, we made a deal together with the tutor — she gave me another, more advanced, student’s book and we had appointments every two weeks to check my answers and progress. Thanks to this flexibility of hers the course was adjusted to my needs. Similar cases happened at some engineering courses in the beginning of MSc — students from the same BSc had them in the past and were given advanced individual assignments to accomplish by the end of the course.

At the faculty of Applied Optics we have a Student Research Laboratory for Optical Engineering that is supervised by one of the professors. It is a place where we can run our own projects, try out new ideas, learn from each other and organise events on optics. Quite some of the projects that started in the student lab resulted in R&D projects supported by the university and/or scientific publications. Some of those projects were parts of the BSc and MSc thesis for the students of our faculty or the necessary facilities were found in the lab. In one of my previous posts I’ve already mentioned the academic opportunities inside the university and the variety of them is truly a representation of academic freedom for students. The same goes for course projects and thesis topics — throughout my studies we were always free to choose the topics that are the most interesting for us from a list or even suggest our own.

The relationship with some educators at my faculty went beyond discussing the topics of the courses — we shared some educational videos on optics that we found, interesting articles, gathered for consultations on non-course related matters if needed. When I returned from my academic exchange in VUB, Brussels, three of the professors I interact the most with and my thesis supervisor were genuinely interested in my experience and I shared materials and findings with them. The open dialogue that was a norm from the very beginning with educators in my MSc program was one of the most important things that made me wonder and learn more.

From the purely positive examples I give it might seem that I studied somewhere in heaven — far from it. However, the attitude I encountered is the one I’d wish for every student to experience.