"Scholarships keep you from being complacent"

ICEF’s top performing students know they are the best. Their sense of confidence is heightened by their being qualified for merit-based scholarships from VTB Bank, awarded to bachelor’s and master’s students for outstanding academic progress. One recipient of VTB Scholarship is Andrey Voronin, a third year student earning ICEF Bachelor's Degree. Here is why he thinks ICEF outperforms other faculties, how HSE Lyceum helps achieve better academic progress and what’s in store for students of ICEF Academia.

School was always easy for me. In my tenth grade, however, when I joined HSE Lyceum, things stopped working themselves out as easily as they did before without any effort from my side. At the Lyceum, you are pretty much on you own. You learn to be self-sufficient just like university students and you are ‘learning to learn’. I am very grateful to all the people I met there and especially to my teachers for putting me on the right track. So, when I moved on from the Lyceum to ICEF, it seemed a natural progression of my learning path.

In the end of my first year of undergraduate studies, I was ranked the third best-performing student and it came as a nice surprise for me to learn, later in November, I was nominated for the VTB Scholarship. The scholarship keeps you from being complacent about your progress and I am glad that we have Russia’s largest bank as a sponsor to help us strengthen our motivation.

In 2021 VTB Bank stays committed to supporting ICEF’s best-performing students.

Its monthly scholarship of RUB 10,000 is awarded to the top ten students in each year of the undergraduate programme, while the top ten master’s students are eligible for the yearly award of RUB 75,000.

Eligible for the scholarship are also prizewinners and finalists of the Russian Economics/Mathematics Olympiad among school students, Vysshaya Proba (Top Grade) Contest in economics or mathematics, as well as enrollees with highest scores in the Unified State Examination.

With VTB Bank Scholarship, the most aspiring of enrollees all over Russia stand higher chances of getting a place on ICEF’s undergraduate programme.

I believe it is only through effort that we move on to better things. The same is true about getting to the top of the rating, but I don’t think high ranking should be a goal in itself. It is far more important to want to learn and to believe that the knowledge you’re acquiring will prove useful, that it won’t leave you jobless and will make your life a lot more interesting. That’s my firm belief.

Studying at ICEF can be a tough experience but there are many ways to make it enjoyable

The VTB Scholarship payments continue to be made to me and have been very stimulating. One of my recent, and so far most pleasant, achievements is the top place in the in-house student research project competition that I share with Yevgeny Grigorenko for our joint paper on financial markets. My high rating at ICEF Academia earned me a scholarship to attend the Summer School programme at LSE. Currently, we are preparing for the university-wide contest in econometrics and are writing articles.

There is a choice of pathways at ICEF. If you are a student who does not aspire to pursue a career in academia, you will benefit greatly from ICEF’s curriculum with its solid, diverse and hands-on courses and helpful career services: it seems like you are destined to get a good job, say, in consulting if you are an ICEF graduate. But above all, the learning process here is about getting to the heart of the matter, not rote memorization, although understanding per se is what students attain on their own.

As for higher aspiring students, many of them find themselves faced with the choice between HSE/NES and ICEF. Not to compare the two but for the sake of their merit, the HSE/NES BSc programme is the top in its class and if there’s anyone we, Mathematics students, should live up to, it’s the HSE/NES students. I would say that the advantage of ICEF BSc programme lies in its hands-on courses such as finance, econometrics and economic theory, especially when it comes to understanding of the concepts, but its mathematics course could have been more comprehensive. I don’t mean to say it’s not as in-depth as it is at other economic faculties. It is. It’s just that some of the course units that I personally find useful are left out of the scope. But then again, it’s my mathematical side that’s speaking now, math students can never get enough exact sciences. At any rate, I see ICEF as a perfect combination of western educational traditions and domestic approach – exactly how I expected it to be.

ICEF can be rightly proud of its career services. One important source of information, alongside career events, is the peer-learning environment, when you learn about corporate cultures – and things like where students worked, how they like it and how to get there – from students themselves. As for opportunities in academic area, you basically learn about them from the faculty staff on a one-to-one basis. While the information about careers in industry is coming in from every corner, academic pathways seem to be somewhat neglected. But, as they say, when there’s a will there’s a way, and one way is by joining ICEF Academia.

I don’t think I should rush into a career in the industry after graduation, because I know how easily one can get engulfed by it. I think we should try and absorb as many new things as we can for as long as our grey matter allows us to. I might do a MPhil degree in England or a PhD in the United States like Ekaterina Ivanushkina to find my place in academia and maybe go on to have a career in international organizations. It would be nice to be doing something really useful – something that would make me want to reach my fullest potential and whatever abilities I may have.