News

Over the course of three months, 11 students from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science interned for Google at the company’s offices in the U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, and Poland. The HSE News Service spoke with several of these students and learned how they got the internships, how Google treats its interns, and whether or not a refrigerator full of ice cream interferes with the work process.

Leading researcher at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, respected Russian Italian studies specialist and expert on literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Mikhail Andreev, has been made Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Following a long history of cooperation between HSE and VTB24 bank, a programme has been launched to fund financial research through a university endowment. This entails the establishment of a VTB Chair position as the logical outcome of this programme.

Portrait galleries of renowned scientists, research laboratories right next to large classrooms and auditoriums, educational programmes for students and principals – these are just a few of the things discussed during an excursion around the HSE Institute of Education as part of the Open House project. Victoria Malova, a second-year student in the Evidence-Based Education Policy master’s programme, and Denis Federiakin, a second-year student in the Measurement in Psychology and Education master’s programme, served as the tour guides for the day.

Better nutrition can have a lot to do with the transition to democracy: the more protein-rich, high-quality foods appear in a society's diet, the higher the likelihood of democratic reforms. Apparently, a richer diet is associated with an increase in the middle class, which tends towards economic and political independence and democracy-fostering values. Andrey Shcherbak has found, based on a cross-country comparative study using data on 157 countries, that a change in people's eating habits can serve as a predictor of impending political change. His findings are published in the paper 'A Recipe for the Democracy? The Spread of the European Diet and Political Change'.

From October 20-22, 2016, the Russian Association of Higher Education Researchers held its 7th International Conference ‘University between Global Challenges and Local Commitments’ at HSE Moscow. This annual event brings together researchers and educators who are interested in higher education development to discuss challenges and goals facing universities and their stakeholders (students, faculty, administrators, graduates etc.).

On October 18th, 2016,  the opening ceremony of the master’s programme ‘Global Business’ was held at HSE Nizhny Novgorod. Representatives from the three partner universities took part in the event.

Disciplining students for a variety of activities, such as downloading papers from the internet, engaging in plagiarism or cheating on exams may not work when academic dishonesty is so commonplace at university that even top performers tend to follow the crowd in this. Indeed, academic misconduct can be self-perpetuating: if a student gets away with cheating once, they are more likely to cheat next time, according to Natalia Maloshonok.