Interview with SAS Graduate | Ilya Sklyuev

Why did you choose SAS?

I was finishing my studies at UTMN gymnasium in the applied mathematics profile, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it. SAS said that for the first two years everyone has a common study program, there are elective courses, foreign professors teach, a lot of very interesting people, and the choice of profile will be made only after these two years. It became interesting and I entered IT, but after meeting many historians who were teaching at SAS at that time, I realized what I wanted to do, so later I switched to the history profile. However, fate turned so that I ended up going into media in general, which I don't really regret. I use interdisciplinary to the full.

You, like other SAS students, have had a very diverse educational experience. Was it difficult to study?

Yes, more than challenging, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. The principle of learning in our community, which is followed by the instructors, is work hard, play hard, i.e. total dedication. If you just want to go and study, get a diploma and go to work somewhere — there are a lot of places like that, please, but here we have a real contribution to education. They demand a lot, but you get a lot too. I have absolutely no regrets. You get powerful flexible skills here because the groups of people you interact with are constantly changing. We don't have group assignments for all four years: every new elective or major course is a new group of people you have to get in touch with, work with, and get to know better. This strengthens the bonds within the whole School: everyone you study and interact with teaches you how to work on projects with different people and in a short time frame, to work culture, which over time becomes a very useful skill in life.

I will not be modest: now I am a diverse person, because I am fr om SAS. There are institutes wh ere only mathematicians of different fields or programmers study, i.e. they are in some narrow information field, while here in one building historians, anthropologists, and economists often cross paths in the same courses. I think meeting different people motivates you to develop in all directions. Of course, some areas will be more prioritized, but you leave here — a good word fr om SAS terminology - multidisciplinary. In other words, SAS graduates not narrowly focused specialists, but multidisciplinary people who understand how everything works around them, and not at the top, but more in-depth.

Was it difficult to immerse yourself in studying different disciplines in English rather than Russian?

I was sure that I was not ready for such a thing, but, as practice has shown, you get used to it very quickly. I think at that time many people came to SAS with a basic level of English, but they started to learn very quickly. Maybe it was a problem in the first two months, when there is a period of adaptation, but thanks to communication with people and writing papers in English, everything was quickly built up.

It is a mesmerizing feeling when you can talk to a person fr om another country and with a different cultural background, almost as an equal in a common international language. Teachers from, say, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia come to us, and we choose English to find a common contact. However, the exchange of experience does not end only with communication within the university: we are still in contact with some professors. Even outside the walls of SAS, they can give you recommendations for graduate programs and advise you on wh ere to go next. Connections are not lost.

Why get a bachelor's degree in history now?

That's a very good question. I took history courses simply out of interest in certain topics, and I didn't plan to associate myself with history, because I had no idea what I could become later on. I even had a conflict with my parents about it: they asked me if I would just be a history teacher later on.

After my second year at the Major Fair, Prof. Tomasz Bluszewicz said that historians are not only history teachers, librarians and archivists, but firstly they are people who get a very serious cultural base fr om which you can make anything. When you study history, you learn how human societies work, you learn basic economic, anthropological, and sociological concepts, and then you can go anywhere with that. For example, marketing, analyzing the audience, working in the media, understanding how to find the right context, what to ask a person, how to argue and correctly present the material. You can start to fully specialize in management or law. And if you want to build your career in science, then not only history, but also sociology, political science, and many other disciplines are open to you.

So your parents didn't understand your choice?

At first, they were very happy and enthusiastic, because SAS was perceived as an alien ship that landed in the center of Tyumen with foreign teachers, and then they asked: “How to put all this into practice?”

SAS is originally an institution of researchers who do serious things about science and education. People felt that there was very little practical orientation here. I would say that there was a slight element of that initially, but over time that got corrected. We had courses run by people from SKOLKOVO who put a practical focus on it, team games and training sessions, we were taught how to write CVs, and we had interesting guest speakers talking about more practically applicable things like big data analytics and urbanism. You are given all the opportunities: take whatever you want, build yourself up, and I think that's one of the features of SAS — very strong freedom in every sense.

Already in your 2nd year you started working, and not as a historian, as your parents predicted. What did you do and how did you combine work with your studies at SAS?

I did not take part in conferences and organizing events in SAS, but focused on my career, starting to work remotely part-time. SAS, unfortunately, does not give very much free time to students. The phrase “from session to session students live cheerfully” doesn't work here, because we live, work and study at the moment, and it forms a more serious attitude to studying in general, so I immediately realized that I needed something remote.

Thanks to SAS, I started practicing my writing skills, working with sources, and started writing articles for various publications on a freelance basis. I wrote about all sorts of things, from technology to sports, and eventually I realized that I was interested in organizational issues. I think it's thanks to history, because you study different information and reconstruct a picture of events. That's how I came to the topic of business, wh ere you have to put together a whole picture, because no one will show you a ready-made scheme: you have to take interviews, you have to make conversations, finding out details and looking at different aspects of the business. This pushed me towards business journalism. For six months I worked at vc.ru in a large editorial team, wh ere we moderated and guided young authors, and also wrote texts ourselves. I was a technology columnist with the main focus on Russia: I wrote about IT in general and how the industry interacts with business. During my time there, for example, I had time to talk to people fr om Yandex and MTS. Later, I left because it became difficult to combine a five-day work week with such a busy study schedule, but I didn't stop working in the media industry.

Now I'm working in two places at the same time. The first is a publication about urban services called “Truesharing.” Just at the beginning of the year, we published a big study about the changes in the field of kicksharing, about scooters, which piss many people off, but in fact this is a very serious industry of micro-mobility, which is changing cities before our eyes. Second place is company Glyph Media. We deal with company blogs: we help large IT companies find materials for their blogs.

By the way, in my three years of work experience, I have never once worked anywhere physically, but only remotely, even with colleagues I know only by video link. Most often I work in the SAS coffee shop on the first floor with a laptop with headphones on. In this regard, SAS is even more enjoyable because it creates a community that you can still contact after graduation. Most of the people with whom I often arrange a joint co-working space are good acquaintances fr om my studies.

Remote work today is already the norm and is successfully practiced in almost all spheres. What do you think, can this be the case with higher education?

Why, in principle, should you pay for education (I'm not talking about the budget) if you can read everything yourself at home and educate yourself to the full? I would say this: a university creates a certain community - these are the people who work in it, your classmates and professors. You are not sitting with yourself all the time, but you are constantly interacting with people, and they push you in a certain direction and help you develop. The distance learning course also showed that we lacked personal contact: people in video chat windows are a rather sad sight.

When I come to SAS, I am immediately energized by the environment: people around me, familiar faces, socializing, sharing news. The most important thing here, besides freedom, is the community. I think that one of the most interesting communities has formed here, plus people, when they leave SAS, form other communities and stimulate changes around them. For example, I have acquaintances who, after SAS, work at TyumSU, dealing with education issues, or cooperate with the Steamship Company and My Territory, participating in organizing cultural events in the city, helping to organize exhibitions, lectures by interesting people - in general, creating new opportunities for development in Tyumen. There are also many people who simply work in IT, PR, media and more. Everyone chooses for themselves.

Tell us about your plans after graduation. Is there life after SAS?

In fact, even at the beginning of my studies, I had an idea that after my bachelor's degree I would take a year off and work in peace. Now I clearly understand that I want to go to graduate school, because I am morally charged and on this charge I want to go forward. I really hope to enter the “Modern Journalism” track (Business Journalism track) at the Higher School of Economics, wh ere there are high English requirements, and I understand fr om the educational basis that this is what I need. In general, now, I plan to both study and work.

Often graduates go abroad to study because SAS gives a strong international basis. Even if faculty and alumni leave, the contacts remain. It is important to say that there are those who plan to return to Tyumen or other cities to change the space around us for the better with the valuable experience they have gained. I have already said that SAS used to be treated as an alien ship, but now practice shows that the roots have sprouted and that we are helping to change the space.

I am really pleased that SAS has become a more stable institution over time. There is still a lot of experimentation, programs change, but people have a clear vision of wh ere we are going and why we are developing all this. There's not some uncertainty. You get a cultural base, there are two years to really think and learn as much as possible about everything, and the next two years to go deeper into a specific area. Believe me, I've seen a lot of good examples, even I.T. people finish their degree very briskly. SAS actually understands wh ere it is going and what it is doing. Even if the student himself doesn't yet understand what he needs and why, he will eventually make up his mind. I think my example is still basically relevant.

To summarize very briefly, my goal for the near future is to develop and work with a media focus, while continuing to be interested in other disciplines.

What advice would you give to SAS applicants?

I would say this: prepare yourself, it will be tough... Actually, it won't be. You just need to understand that in SAS you go through, roughly speaking, an initiation procedure: you are offered a chance to try different educational directions. I recommend those who come here to open up to the world and go towards it, and then you will get everything you want. Maybe someone will become a narrow specialist, because people have different interests, but SAS gives you a chance to simply reconsider your life and change it radically, by 180 degrees.