Sergey Kurochkin: "We Work to Reach the Level of the World's Leading Universities"

10:28, February 21, 2022

Vice-Rector for International Relations spoke about the Ural Federal University's Internationalization Policy

At the end of January, the Ural Federal University Academic Council approved the Internationalization Policy. The concept of the document involves expanding the practice of internships for students, graduate students and faculty at the best universities in the world, increasing the share of international students and faculty, increasing the number of foreign grants and publications by UrFU scientists in international top-rated scientific journals, cooperation between UrFU and world scientific and educational centers and corporations, and international accreditation of the university's educational programs.

In the latest issue of the Ural Federal newspaper (No. 4, February 21), Sergey Kurochkin, Ural Federal University Vice-Rector for International Relations, spoke about the main ideas that formed the basis of the document. In particular, the text of the Policy talks about creating a certain number of strategic international partnerships with the world's leading universities.

"We got the idea of creating strategic partnerships from the internationalization strategy of the Sorbonne University, which, being a union of several universities, is structurally similar to UrFU. The list of foreign partners of the UrFU includes more than 500 foreign universities from more than 70 countries. Strategic partnerships mean focusing attention and efforts on the development of relations with some of them. One of the possible selection criteria is the correspondence of foreign partners' research activities to the topics of UrFU strategic research projects within the Priority 2030 program," said Sergey Kurochkin.

Today, Ural Federal University has more than 320 partners from Asian universities and more than 250 from European universities. The text of the Internationalization Policy states that Ural Federal University's priority is to create joint programs with European universities.

"We note the high activity of our Asian partners, we welcome it and support it in every possible way. At the same time, we are interested in establishing and developing educational and scientific relations with a number of European countries and universities. For example, with Slovenia, Slovakia, Belgium, France, and many others. Why do we consider Europe a priority? European universities have a rich practice of internationalization of education and science and successfully attract students and scholars from all over the world. For example, in Oxford the percentage of foreign students is more than 40% (in our case - about 14%, we aim to increase the share to 20% in 2024). Therefore it is logical that in preparing our Internationalization Policy we used the research of Oxford scholars on global trends in the development of education, science and technology. And for the basis of our Policy of Education and Science Internationalization we took the concepts of universities of Sorbonne, Seville, Bologna, Strasbourg, Dortmund, Lorraine, Charles University in Prague, etc.", said Sergey Kurochkin.

According to the Vice-Rector for International Relations, Ural Federal University aims at the level of these universities and speaks the same language with them.

"One of the goals of the Policy, which is a publicly available document and is open for reading, is to facilitate the task of promoting our students and scholars in the global academic space. In the course of preparing the Internationalization Policy and thoroughly analyzing the experience of many national and foreign universities, searching for global best practices and internationalization mechanisms, we were convinced that Ural Federal University is one of the leaders among Russian universities. Now our strategic goal is to turn Ural Federal University into a world-class scientific, educational and innovative center. The creation of a specific list of activities, a roadmap for the implementation of the ideas and goals included in the Internationalization Policy, will help to achieve this goal," explained Sergey Kurochkin.

The news article was translated by UrFU International Marketing Office
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