Faculty of Economic Sciences Holds Math BootCamps for Those Starting Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees
More than 200 future bachelor’s and master’s students from around the world spent the last two weeks of summer improving their mathematical knowledge and honing their problem-solving skills. The free online classes have been held for the fourth year in a row. They allow first-year students not only to succeed in their studies, research, and project activities at HSE University’s Faculty of Economic Sciences (FES), but also to quickly integrate into the international community of students, graduates, and teachers.
Math BootCamp allows future bachelor’s students to refresh essential sections of their school mathematics courses ahead of September 1. The format was first tested in 2020 and offered only to international students due to the differences in their school curricula. However, interest in the project from Russian students led to its expansion.
The Math BootCamp for Master’s Degree Applicants is a crash course in higher mathematics that includes intensive online classes, lectures, seminars, and consultations in calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, and mathematical statistics.
The camp leaders, FES professors Fuad Aleskerov and Elena Vakulenko, aimed to create a working atmosphere similar to a university lecture hall. They believe that the camp will help recent school students and bachelor’s graduates—as well as those who finished university long ago—move to a new educational level and, in some cases, change their specialisation and career direction. The digital format allows camp participants to watch recordings of all the lectures and seminars. The camp supervisors check homework and provide consultations.
Lectures are delivered by FES teachers Nikolay Polyakov, Kirill Furmanov, and Dmitry Borzykh. Seminars are conducted by Ilona Nadrus and Mikhail Dubrovsky (Economics programme graduates), Angelina Yudina (student of the Master’s programme in Economics and Economic Policy and research intern at the International Centre for Decision Choice and Analysis), and others. Oxana Budjko, head of the FES International Department, is the Camp Manager.
Margarita Pronina, seminar participants, fourth-year student of the Bachelor’s programme in Economics
This year, the participants of math camp were particularly enthusiastic. Many asked to stay after class to analyse an interesting problem or prove some property of logarithms. I thought that the faster you get it done, the better, but here the participants were more interested in the volume and quality of the knowledge gained.
Elena Vakulenko, Academic Supervisor of the online Master’s programme in Economic Analysis
We have developed the camp programme mainly for those master’s degree applicants whose education is far removed from mathematics, as well as for those who studied a long time ago and have extensive professional experience, but decided to improve their knowledge and enrol in a master’s programme. To help such applicants, we have prepared an intensive express course on the basics of calculus, linear algebra, probability theory and mathematical statistics. These are the very first steps that our future students will take in the main courses of economic education: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. We are confident that such basic training will help our students quickly adapt to studying in FES programmes and comfortably get through the challenging starting period.