PetrSU Master’s student shared his impressions of the competition

Conducting a face-to-face stage for undergraduates of the Scholarship Competition of the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation is always an event that deserves attention. However, if the face-to-face stage of this competition in past years was face-to-face, since it was held by a general collection of all applicants for the scholarship on one site, then in the 2020/2021 academic year due to the pandemic it was transferred to the online mode using the Zoom platform , WhatsApp and a special Internet site of the foundation.
Dmitry Slyassky, winner of the Scholarship competition for undergraduates 2020/2021 academic year, undergraduate student of the Institute of Economics and Law of PetrSU shared his impressions:

To be honest, I had serious concerns about this version of the competition. How much can be implemented in this format? As it turned out – a lot.

The general theme of the entire presentation was the world of Fijital, in which the role of digital technologies is increasing (which is not surprising given this version of the face-to-face stage).

The competition itself lasted from 9:00 to 16:00 with a break of one hour (although it lasted only one day – for me it was February 1, 2021). Throughout this time, the contestants were asked to answer several questions. For example, how are the style and rules of communication changing in the transition to the digital world? How the demand for human knowledge has changed in the digital age: volume, depth, focus, and others.

The chat took place in our group’s WhatsApp, in which all of us were required to give answers to questions. I ended up on the Jobs team.

But, of course, the face-to-face stage was not limited to answering these questions.

The organizers of the competition managed to use the capabilities of the digital environment even for such a highly specialized platform as Zoom. The game “Grani”, in which you had to earn points by substituting your chips with the necessary sides to the chips of other teams (green numbers give a point, red ones take away). In our “league” we beat all the others, but in general our team became the third in the overall standings.

Also, many other individual and group tasks were carried out – from finalizing the project in a very limited time to inventing a fairy tale in poetic form with the main characters (inanimate objects) in 15 minutes. At the end of the entire face-to-face stage, a quiz was held for points between the groups. There were both questions that require a simple answer (to be honest – some required such specific knowledge that, in the absence of such knowledge, a solution even using the Internet was almost impossible), and those, the answer to which was some specific photograph of all the members of the group.

In my opinion, the competition was unique both in its conduct and in the experience and emotions gained from it.