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Some keywords:
Pascal Delphi Algorithms Data structures C C++ Java C# x86 assembly language Databases SQL InterBase Microsoft Access Artificial intelligence (AI) Perceptron
Entering the Ulyanovsk State Technical University was a piece of cake for me. Since I finished my school with a silver medal, I only needed an excellent result from the first exam – mathematics. I had 100 points of 100 possible. No more questions were asked to me. A direct admission. But you might be wondering about that silver medal. If someone finished the school with only excellent marks, he was awarded a gold medal. Those who had one or two good marks (the rest had to be excellent) were awarded silver medals. (I have never heard about bronze, titan, iron or lead medals.) The only good mark that I had was in Russian literature, all my other marks were excellent. Therefore, if you were hoping to have a long great discussion about Fyodor Dostoevsky or Leo Tolstoy, I might leave you slightly disappointed since my knowledge of the subject did not deserve higher mark than a good school level. You might prefer talking to someone who has excellent knowledge.
Since Russia is a big country (I really hope that you are not shocked by hearing this fact), I cannot really say anything about the higher education in general – there are many different regions with many different institutions and specializations. I can only describe my personal experience – I could learn a lot. My tertiary education was between 2001-2007 and back then it was a combination of the remnants from the Soviet education system with changes caused by the Bologna Process. If you are thinking about Chimera or some other creature composed of different parts, you are not that far from the truth. But I would also say that the creature was quite friendly and helpful to those students who expressed the necessary respect. Nevertheless, one still needs to see some statistics – we were about 90 students in the beginning, the number of those who could finish their education (as either specialists or masters) was somewhere between 25-30. By the way, our group was considered to be unusually strong. Perhaps, not everyone would say that the creature was friendly.
The old Soviet education system was known for being particularly broad. The purpose was to give students a solid foundation. Lifelong learning at work was always considered as most natural and desirable. Since the modern Russian education system inherited its grounds from the Sovier predecessor, education programs tend to remain broad. But there are some differences too. For example, unlike my parents, I was no longer required to study "scientific communism" as part of my university courses. Perhaps, it caused my worldview to be incomplete. I might need to fill this gap in the future.
Joking aside, during my bachelor's education I had 52 courses and projects over four years. The following two years of my master's education in Russia included 22 courses and projects. One can compare it with only 10 subjects in my master's education in Sweden, which also took two years. It seems like the Western education system tends to be more specialized. I guess, there is a point in that – having bigger subjects might help to learn them deeper. However, the Russian approach says: "A specialist is like a gumboil: his fullness is one-sided." It is hard to argue with that.
In the beginning of my university studies I had to program a lot in Pascal and Delphi. But the real focus was learning the most common algorithms and data structures. The language of the exercises quickly changed to C. Once the approach changed to object-oriented, we got quite a few new tasks – in C++ and Java. A bit later also in C#. After some time it no longer mattered which language to use – the most important was knowing the general principle. In parallel, there were a few courses about the hardware – knowing the physical part helps to develop efficient solutions. Operating systems, computer graphics, networks and information security were among other interesting courses. Some courses were hard. For example, the course in machine-oriented programming caused many of my classmates to reconsider their professional choices – switching to other educational programs turned out to be easier than developing a project in x86 assembly language. A few others (including me) were not used to give up and even took some extra tasks to get additional points. On the other hand, the next course about databases felt much easier. For someone who already knows English, how hard could it be to write queries in SQL? A piece of cake. Everyone could do it. During the course we got to use InterBase that was shipped together with Delphi. However, any other relational database would do as well. I even saw some big projects built around a file made in Microsoft Access. Cheap and cheerful!
Quite a few courses did not have much in common with computer science. Is it necessary for an engineer to know history, political science, the science of culture and sociology? Obviously, yes. All those courses in social sciences and humanities (and a few more!) were a mandatory part of the education programme. In fact, quite a few of my classmates were expelled after failing one of those courses (especially the course in history). However, the fact that those courses were at the technical university made the teachers quite interested in cooperation with some students. Students could make nice multimedia applications and mention teachers as "scientific supervisors". Suddenly, those applications became ready for publishing as university works. How much "scientific value" was in all this? I have no idea. Nevertheless, it was some easy way for us to get extra points. My classmates and I were simply seeing this as a deal. Nowadays, we often hear that someone "wants to make a deal". Somehow, I have never read that famous book about the subject. Perhaps, I should have.
Since my official master's degree specialization was "intelligent systems", artificial intelligence (AI) became the area I had to become familiar with. Today it is a hot topic in the software industry, some even talk about "a bubble". But 20 years ago it was an area that was free from unnecessary hype. Building a software prototype for image recognition was a particularly interesting task. The project was based on Rosenblatt's perceptron. The topic of my research was "Active model of organizational structures for software development teams", which was developed as a plugin to question-answer processor NetWIQA (Net Working In Questions and Answers). You can ask your favourite search engine about NetWIQA and dig deeper into the subject. But a much safer option is just to take my word for it. (Even though some people could argue that believing me might not be that safe.)