In total, the course welcomed 44 students of grades 7-10 from the city’s schools. Winners and runners-up of the regional rounds of the National Competition and the Maxwell competition passed the selection automatically.

The course was held on February 17-21 at a youth camp in Leningrad Oblast and included two tracks: physics and computer science. Guided by lecturers from ITMO’s Faculty of Physics and Information Technologies and Programming Faculty, students worked through competition problems and the ways to solve them. Additionally, students could attend lectures on dark matter research and relativity theory by Dmitry Glazov, a leading researcher at ITMO’s Faculty of Physics, as well as career guidance meetings.

Among the course’s mentors were current ITMO students who had won the National Competition in physics and now continue to take part in various student contests in the subject. The list of experts included Igor Shenderovich, PhD, lecturer at the Faculty of Physics, and Nikolay Vedernikov and Margarita Sablina, assistants at the Information Technologies and Programming Faculty.

“We wanted to give talented young students from regular schools a chance to gain the skills needed for physics and computer science competitions. Such courses will help increase the number of school competition participants and, consequently, St. Petersburg-based winners and runners-up of the National Competition in these subjects,” shares Yana Muzychenko, one of the school’s organizers and the deputy head of ITMO’s School of Physics and Engineering.  

By participating in such competitions, students can significantly increase their chances of getting into a university. For instance, ITMO welcomes winners and runners-up of the National Competition and competitions included in the extended list without exams (they only have to score at least 75 points on the required Unified State Exams – USE).

“In 2024, competition winners took up nearly all tuition-free positions in all three programs offered at our faculty. Traditionally, it’s very hard to land a place in any of them based only on USE scores, as students need an average score of 300-310 points, including personal achievements – thus, competitions can truly be of great help. Moreover, competition winners are sought after not only by universities, but also by IT companies, sponsors, and partners of such contests,” says Andrey Stankevich, the dean of the Information Technologies and Programming Faculty.