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 the academic opportunities. However, feel free to extrapolate my experience to get a general feeling.
Today I’m going to tell you about the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) and give some advice to those who might take part in a student programming competition.
This is almost the first question I ask my new foreign friends after some classic small talk. As a buddy, I always meet a lot of foreigners. And it’s extremely interesting to know what people think about our country from the other side of the world.
The hardest thing for students all over the world is always passing exams. Everybody hates books, notes, projects and reviews, university seems to be a torture. We all say "I need motivation"! Let’s get closer to the point and find the best recipe now.
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."
On September 1, the celebration of first-year students ITMO.GO took place at Aleksandrovsky Park in front of Baltic House. This means that all enrolled applicants can now proudly call themselves students. Of course, for everyone this is a new and important stage of life, because getting a higher education determines not only your future professional skills, but also forms ideas about many things not related to future work. In addition, do not forget about rest and entertainment. And ITMO.GO confirms these words.
Saint Petersburg, the city of winds, the northern Venice or call it as you may, is a city that is full of wonders and places to discover. Your innate curiosity will be awakened by the vast variety of socio-culturalism and all the touristic attractions it is very well known for. Starting from the architectural design the city holds, embracing hints of baroque, renaissance, modernism and still tightly embracing hints of communism, whispering millions of decades of history while you walk on its streets and offering a wide cultural entertainment.
Winter is already knocking on Saint Petersburg’s doors with snow already falling out in the streets with autumn on its way out taking with it the first half of the semester. It seems as though just yesterday I was enjoying the free summer time. However, we all know that time doesn’t stop, and eventually everything comes to an end, giving way for other things to come. Those things in this case are the mid-semester tests, or how they are called here, "control work". Everybody’s busy studying for the tests, hurrying to give to their professors pending homework and laboratory works, otherwise they will be left as a "debt" you must settle before the end of the semester.
For a long time people didn’t comprehend such unusual phenomena as lights appearing in the sky and self-glowing lighting of some minerals, insects and plants. Currently we know how it works and furthermore, how one can induce and control this unstable process. Read about fluorescence which was firstly marked during an experiment with rotten fish and eventually turned into a tool for treatment.