Tomsk State University: Higher IT School graduates its first bachelors

There are 22 students in the first graduation class of the TSU Higher IT School. 19 of them are citizens of Russia who graduated from the Russian-language version of the program Software Engineering. Three more are international students who studied all four years and defended their graduation theses in English.

Software Engineering in Russian and English is the flagship bachelor’s degree program at the Higher IT School of TSU (HITs). It applies the best teaching practices of the world’s leading universities (MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon): project-based teaching, flipped classrooms, and others. From the second year, students work closely with partner companies: they undergo internships and participate in real IT projects. Graduates of the program are ready-made developers. Already in the first year, they create their first computer game and move on, mastering Data Science, web development, information security, and much more.

– Our students defended a wide range of works – from analytics and development (front, back, and mobile applications) to new topics for us – DevOps, ML, and MLOps. I remember when one of the attestation commission members began to question a graduate student with a topic about MLOps. This is a new area in software engineering, dedicated to the development of the basic elements of information systems (architectures), which are based on machine learning (ML) models. And the member said: “We are now doing the same and have advanced no farther than this student, – said Oleg Zmeev, TSU Vice-Rector for Digital Transformation, Academic Director of the Higher IT School.
Another graduate work, which attracted special attention, was devoted to working with a video stream in mines, written for a real customer and the conditions of a particular mine – so that workers, as little as possible and in safe conditions, can go down into the mine where the combine picking the rock is working. The harvester there goes along a certain line, and breakdowns occur when it deviates from this line. The HITs graduate’s thesis offers a system that monitors such deviations in real-time and informs the operator of potential problems.

There are many disciplines in Software Engineering that help graduates become leaders in their profession. Among the first graduates of HITs are Denis Sharapov and Igor Romin, winner and silver medalist of the National Interuniversity Championship WorldSkills Russia in Web Design and Development, and winners of the Leaders of Digital Transformation competition in 2020.

– We have permanently increased the enrollment, and this time it will almost double – we now have 70 budget places on the program. In addition, this year HITs will have a master’s degree program for 14 places. Seven of the defended bachelors said that they would definitely submit documents there, five are still thinking about it, – says Oleg Zmeev.