ITMO… It’s More Than a University.

But what does that really mean? What are we here at ITMO trying to do? What does it mean to be more than just a university? To borrow Shakespeare’s words, "That IS the question."

Different cultures around the world possess their own concept for what a university education entails, but they all share the same belief that university is a place of academia, of education, of knowledge acquisition. University is where people go when they want to attain the knowledge and develop the skills necessary for them to succeed and live a good life.

It’s at that point where the similarities end and the cultural differences begin.

For some, university is purely that place for you to receive all you need for life, but for others, university represents a family of people who come together through adversity to explore life and uncover new discoveries. University is a place where you can push the boundaries of your knowledge and expand your horizons so you can enter the world with a growth mindset ready for you to not just survive, but live, life after university.

University for me was that place. Throughout my four years at Dartmouth College, where I lived, worked, and studied in the small town of Hanover, New Hampshire, I learned more about life than I had ever done before or in the five years since graduating. Dartmouth for me was more than a university. It was a place where I came to understand a lot about life, about love, about friendship, about tragedy, and about pursuing your passions.

Admittedly, Dartmouth and ITMO vary greatly in terms of the existing academic culture and student life, but little can be done about that. ITMO, situated in the beautiful city of Saint Petersburg, is in very different circumstances than Dartmouth, whose student population is roughly equivalent to the town’s population. But it was that small town atmosphere that greatly contributed to the life experiences I had at Dartmouth, because it meant class sizes were small while professors and students often interacted on a first-name basis. The assignments we completed as students not only always challenged us academically, but they also remained relevant in helping us develop the skills we needed to succeed in the 21st century.

Using all the resources I possess to the best of my abilities, I try my best to immerse my own English students in this sort of academic environment where every task trains not just their abilities, but their critical-thinking skills as well. With my C2, and sometimes really advanced C1, students, we embark on a journey of discovery that takes them through a wide realm of interdisciplinary subjects where, for them to succeed, they must work together and help one another as a team.

Some of the more basic tasks we complete train their teamwork skills. These can include academic riddles or murder mysteries. In the case of the latter, students receive a pile of evidence where on each piece of paper a small clue is written. All clues are unique and students work in collaboration to sort out unnecessary information before piecing together a logical narrative and testing it against the evidence. This is easier said than done, because each challenge takes minimum approximately 30 minutes.

Other tasks target the development of soft skills, such as presentation or business skills. Students practice hard to develop their presentation skills, paying attention to major factors like PowerPoint Design strategies to the smallest minutiae such as verbal ticks ("uh', "uhm', "like', etc.), intonation, and body language. They start small with minor 5-minute presentations before gradually advancing higher in time until they can deliver an effective, interactive 30-minute group presentation. Once they’ve delivered around seven presentations, my students endure some of the more challenging aspects of doing business such as conducting negotiations, managing team members, and building a consensus, for which they learn critical vocabulary terms like trade-offs and BATNAs.

Normally, this material could serve as a course in and of itself, but this content is simply the base. All future projects rely on how well students developed their presentation skills and aspects of business skills like group management and delegation. On the bright side, it’s also where the "fun" part of my C2 courses begin.

We explore topics such as Cultural Studies, Cultural Heroes, Data Analytics & Survey Design, American Literature, History of the West, and more. Instruction is delivered in a sort of "survey' style, where the material I present in class focuses more on breadth than depth. But that’s the nature of a skills and critical-thinking course, because what students then must do is delve deeper into the topic.

Let’s take the realm of Cultural Studies for example. It’s an amazing broad field with numerous vague, nebulous areas of discussion. However, our approach is to introduce students to a slightly more scientific way of thinking about culture by utilizing paradigms of cultural analysis, such as Edward T. Hall’s cultural factors. We build off this by exploring what it means to be a cultural hero and what it takes to be a hero. By becoming acquainted with tropes like Joseph Campbell’s "Hero's Journey" or Vladimir Propp’s "Functions of a Folktale", we can begin to understand which items, which characters, and which qualities reign supreme in any given culture’s literature. Analyzing characters that are seemingly different like Captain America, Harry Potter, or Luke Skywalker shows us that these characters are much more similar than they appear, and that the differences can illustrate for us many of the exact same differences between these heroes' respective cultures within a certain era.

If this wasn’t terrifying enough, students then select any non-Western, non-Slavic culture from around the world to analyze the culture’s mindset, its ways, and its perception of heroism and villainy. Upon doing so, students then individually construct a hero and develop the hero’s own journey that remains faithful to the ways and traditions of that culture by writing a folktale that illustrates and implements all the knowledge they have learned. The final step of this project, of course, is a large presentation that informs their classmates about all they have done.

This year, my C2 students will again do much the same thing, but this year we’ll take things one step, or maybe several giant leaps, farther. Our plan is to eventually construct and design an entire world from its political systems, its rivals, its allies, its culture, and, even, a working functional language with a grammatical system, vocabulary, and semantics. Lastly, upon completing an expanded course on cultural studies, we’ll even move on to developing a type of living lab where students take part in what is essentially a term-long hackathon, developing, designing, and implementing applications for a specific, targeted purpose, such as a mobile gaming app or solving a relevant business problem.