Education News at HSE University

Heads of HSE University’s departments and campuses discuss their accomplishments and the implementation of global initiatives with HSE University Life.

The 24th Christmas film seminar of the HSE Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology (LSEI), held at the end of December, was devoted to the causes of anxiety and depression among young people. The focus of the discussion was the 2018 film Eighth Grade, whose main character is a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Research seminars are not merely a formality but a driving force of science. Where do research projects come from? How do students become equal collaborators? And why can a whiteboard in a seminar room sometimes matter more than a formal conference presentation? In this interview for Schola, Alexander Nesterov and Konstantin Sorokin discuss the internal research seminar of the International Laboratory of Game Theory and Decision Making.

Following an established tradition, the HSE School of Foreign Languages held a pre-New Year poster session, during which fourth-year undergraduate students of the Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication programme defended their practice-oriented projects. The assessment panel included representatives of major companies and organisations. Working together with HSE students, they shared their professional experience, skills, and expertise.

In late December 2025, a unique competition was held at HSE University where participants solved challenges not by writing code, but solely by interacting with Sber’s GigaChat artificial intelligence model. The Improm(p)tu hackathon was an experiment less about programming skills than a new form of literacy: the ability to work effectively with AI by translating complex problems into a language neural networks can understand.

HSE students delivered an outstanding performance in the semi-final round of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which took place in St Petersburg on December 15–17, 2025. Two teams—FFTilted from HSE University–Moscow and Muffix Sassif from HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod—will represent the university at the ICPC World Finals, scheduled for 2026. Other HSE teams also won gold and bronze medals. These results confirm the high level of training of HSE students in competitive programming.

On December 12, HSE University welcomed a delegation from the China Academy of Art — one of the most prestigious creative universities in Asia. The visit built on the dialogue launched in September and reaffirmed the mutual interest in collaboration outlined during the visit of Natalia Logutova, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute for Creative Industries Development, to the academy’s campus in Hangzhou. The parties discussed ideas that could form the foundation for long-term partnership—from digital reconstructions of historical spaces to joint educational programmes and research initiatives.

On December 4, an award ceremony for participants of the AIM2Flourish international programme on sustainable business was held at the HSE University Graduate School of Business. This year, the initiative involved second-year students of the Master's in International Management united by their interest in innovative business models aimed at achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)