Success Story
Each year, HSE organizes Winter School for prospective students. Last winter, the number of participants exceeded 500 people, while the number of applications for participation was more than three thousand. The Winter School of Social Sciences in 2015 was attended by 115 students, more than half of whom of were admitted to the Higher School of Economics.
Traditionally, the winter school will be opened by the first vice-rector Vadim Radaev and the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences Andrei Melville who will make a speech about HSE, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Master's programmes.
'The university has two main objectives in organizing such winter schools. The first is to acquaint students with the peculiarities of master's programmes, to introduce them to leading teachers of the programmes and to show that we, HSE, do not have a 'great Chinese wall' between students and teachers. The second task is to convince students to apply for HSE master's programmes and to show that it is not an impossible task.
Higher School of Economics uses a lot of tools to attract students for HSE Master's programs and provide them information about it but Winter School is the most effective in this term. According to statistics, the majority of HSE Winter Schools participants take part in the Olympics and entrance exams for students and graduated.
Many participants of the Winter Schools arrive from Russian regions and even foreign countries. Prospective students admit that undergraduate degrees are not fulfill their requirments for the knowledge that they need in their professional spheres. Thus, many of them wish to change their area of study, to get new skills and knowledge or improve the old one.
Alexander Chepurenko
Head of the School of Sociology, HSE