Winners of Student Initiatives Competition Announced
Following the project public defense held on November 7th-8th, 2016, the winners of the Student Initiative Competition have been announced. This year 84 entries were submitted to the competition, and 34 participants were invited to defend their projects before the Fund Council.
The following projects, which received the most points from the Council, will get the university support: a project on civic education, Tutor Outreach (tutor volunteers for children in children homes), collecting plastic for recycling in five HSE buildings, a donor day at HSE, HSE Open - British parliamentary university debate championship, Bridge of cultures – a creative platform for migrant children integration, HSE RUN 14 – a history quest in Moscow, HSE scientific battles, Excursions for HSE students and people with disabilities, HSE cultural night, project fair – a festival of young entrepreneurs, HSE Outreach – a student charity organization, Keystone – a platform for career development in finance, Student organization forum ‘Student Organizations Space S.O.S.’, quiz on financial literacy for school students, EAEU model at HSE, and KeyContest – an Olympiad in applied finance.
Igor Chirikov, HSE Vice Rector
In my opinion, the competition proved two things. First, once again it showed that, despite a difficult curriculum, a lot of student communities, which consider the university a space for their creative work, volunteering and organizational activity, are active at HSE. Their wide-ranging projects help to make a university education more profound. Secondly, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of project development and student presentations. Many employers now often talk about the importance of soft skills – social and communication skills that make you a specialist with required competences. The student initiatives competition has become an important tool for acquiring these skills, it gives students the opportunity to communicate their ideas, to think about the distribution of roles in the project, and to make interesting presentations.
I want to wish all the participants good luck, I’m looking forward to all the completed projects, and not only the projects that we supported, as many of them have the potential to attract resources through crowdfunding or to find other ways to implement them.
Asya Kleshcheva, Planeta.ru
It was nice to see some good presentations and really motivated students, their willingness to make decisions and to be responsible for the quality of their student life and further education. At the same time, not all student initiatives can be called ‘projects’ involving measurable results, scaling, further development and monetization. As a representative of a crowdfunding platform, I would like to wish the participants success in achieving this result.