Starting points

Choose your field

Typically, in your senior school years you can already tell your academic preferences – humanities, engineering, or natural sciences – and use them to choose the exams to take upon graduating from school. Before you apply to university, try to narrow your field of interest by looking at specific trades that you find appealing:

Take career guidance tests. This will help you get a basic understanding of your abilities and talents.

Consult your family and teachers. Even though their advice shouldn’t be the decisive factor, their opinion can offer a new perspective and inform your own.

Study the job market. Look at different job rankings. For instance, the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Protection makes one (in Russian) every year. You can also check job posting websites to see which specialists are in demand right now and the salary range they are offered.

Find out which universities train such specialists. Write down every university, educational program, and entrance requirements in the fields you are interested in. Then narrow this list down to the most fitting options and learn more about the universities you’ve chosen; you can do this at open days (ITMO hosts these both online and offline, keep an eye on our social media – VK and Telegram – for announcements) or free online courses.

Consider your financials and calculate expenses

If you don’t get a scholarship, will your family be able to pay for your studies or will a loan be necessary? Do you have the opportunity to move for studies? Calculate your expenses and think how they can be compensated. This will help you evaluate the pros and cons.

Basic expenses to account for: 

• dormitory/apartment rent in a specific city;
• prices of groceries, transport, and utilities;
• emergency expenses and leisure;
• student fees (if you don’t study tuition-free).

Read also: 

ITMO Student’s Guide to Saving & Budgeting

How to Shop Like a Local in St. Petersburg  

Here’s how they can be compensated:

Move into a dorm or ask for support from university. Some universities offer partial rent compensation. For instance, at ITMO there is ITMO.Aparts, a service that helps students rent apartments: the university partners with apartment hotels in St. Petersburg to offer students reduced rent options.

Make use of transit passes and student discounts. For instance, students in St. Petersburg get a 50% discount on suburban trains (elektrichkas) and a student transport card (BSK) at a reduced price. 

Get a stipend. Apart from the basic governmental stipends, universities often offer additional ones for talented students. For instance, at ITMO first-year Bachelor’s and Specialist’s students can get up to 300,000 rubles per year – if they get a Platinum student ID.

Once you’ve decided on the academic field and city, you can start looking for universities. There are many dedicated rankings and studies that evaluate universities based on different criteria. There are also specific markers to look for that will indicate that a particular university, for instance, actually works with industrial partners.

Let’s consider some basic criteria:

License and state accreditation

These are the documents that every university must have. A license proves that educational activities are conducted legally, while accreditation confirms that the university’s programs comply with state educational standards. Without these documents, universities can’t teach students. You can check licenses of Russian universities here and accreditations – here (both resources in Russian).

Reputation

According to a study by HSE University, an educational institution’s good reputation is important for 27% of applicants, while for 22% good rankings performance is more important. Various rankings consider different parameters and generally offer a well-rounded picture of each university.

International rankings. Among the most well-known are Times Higher Education, QS World University Rankings, and the Shanghai Ranking (ARWU). As international rankings evaluate universities from all over the world, just being included in one can already be considered an achievement. Make sure to check that the university you are interested in is represented in the rankings. Typically, such rankings take into account the number of publications and citations in leading journals, a university’s reputation among employers and the academic community, achievements of lecturers, participation in international research projects, and share of international students and lecturers.

Russian rankings. The RAEX agency publishes a general ranking of the top 100 universities in the country, as well as specialized rankings by subject fields or federal areas. More analytics can be found in the rankings by Interfax agency and Forbes Russia. The latest ranking by Forbes Russia has been revealed recently, with ITMO landing in the top ten.

Read also:

Forbes Russia: ITMO Climbs Top 10 List of Russian Universities

Quality of education

This parameter is also important, according to 32% of applicants. However, quality of education can mean many things: some applicants consider the qualifications of lecturers and their use of innovative teaching methods, while others pay attention to the contents of courses. You can evaluate quality of education using the following metrics.

Quality of admission to Russian universities. This study (in Russian) evaluates the average Unified State Exam (USE) scores of applicants to tuition-free and fee-based positions in state and private universities, the number of enrolled students, and competition for different universities and programs. With this data, you can see which universities and fields are most in-demand, how hard it is to get in there, and how well-trained the applicants are. For instance, based on these criteria, ITMO is the first in St. Petersburg and among the top five in Russia in terms of quality of admissions.

Federal programs. Two of the most prominent are Priority 2030 and Advanced Engineering Schools. Participation in such programs is a marker that a particular university trains highly qualified specialists in different fields, conducts frontier research, collaborates with industrial partners on technological projects for real-world industrial tasks, as well as regularly reports to the state on its progress.

Read also:

Priority 2030: ITMO Leads Among Participants of National Project

ITMO Ranks in Top 3 of Advanced Engineering Schools Federal Project

Reputation among businesses. A university’s participation in specialized organizations, joint educational programs with major companies, and the number of practicing lecturers from the industry – all of these have a great influence on the quality of education. You can use several rankings to learn how companies evaluate the education provided by a particular university. For example, the AI Alliance ranking indicates which universities train the best AI specialists, while the analytics by the Autonomous Non-Commercial Organization Digital Economics shows which universities contribute the most to IT specialist training. Among the top universities in these two rankings are ITMO, HSE University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, MIREA – Russian Technological University, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Graduates’ employment prospects

It’s important to check how the graduates of each university perform on the job market. In IT, you can use the SuperJob ranking (in Russian), which tracks the average salary of IT graduates. Currently, the top of the ranking belongs to Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, ITMO, and Lomonosov Moscow State University; ITMO graduates make an average of 260,000 rubles a month.

Some rankings also evaluate young entrepreneurs or promising lecturers, such as Forbes Russia 30 Under 30 (in Russian). Often, recent graduates land in the ranking – check who these people are and how they got to where they are.