Bridge of Peoples’ Friendship Fortified

Published: Monday, 16 April 2018 08:44

Last Thursday, NMSTU welcomed Consul General of Germany in Yekaterinburg Dr. Stefan Keil. The meeting gathered the city administration officials, the University leadership, Coordinator for Economic Cooperation of the Consulate of Germany Tatiana Shamber and all the interested teaching staff.

Today, the University has partners in 34 different countries and is engaged in 9 academic mobility programmes for mutual exchanges. So not only NMSTU students go study abroad but also foreign students come to study in Magnitogorsk. Thus, around 500 foreigners are currently among the NMSTU students.

“Of most interest to us are academic mobility programmes for students and teachers. Right now we have such programmes implemented with universities from France, Italy, Turkey, Czech Republic, Serbia and Brazil. We also have a double-degree programme implemented together with the Neusoft Institute of Information in Dalian, China. All of them are mutual exchange programmes, so we have foreign students studying here. Unfortunately, we haven't seen German students at NMSTU so far. But we hope we will soon,” said NMSTU’s vice rector for international affairs Aleksey Korchunov in his welcoming speech.

However, there is an ongoing joint work between NMSTU and its German counterparts. For four years now teachers form NMSTU have been visiting the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Bremen making themselves familiar with their educational processes and research activities. NMSTU have done more than 40 visits to various cities in Germany.  

“Last year the German Academic Exchange Service, i.e. DAAD, awarded more than 4,000 scholarships in Russia. This makes Russia one of the leading countries in terms of academic exchanges. The Magnitogorsk university has a great potential and a lot of knowledge, especially in metallurgy, and we are willing to talk about and promote our further partnership,” said Stefan Keil.

The participants of the meeting concluded that NMSTU should strive to promote exchange programmes with its closest peers in Germany such as RWTH Aachen University, one of the leaders in metallurgy and materials processing, and the classical Leipzig University.

“If we manage to implement those projects in the nearest future, we will have joint academic mobility programmes with Germany meaning that we can benefit from foreign professors reading their lectures at NMSTU. What it means in the first place is that cultural exchange will be taking place, because every such visit is a small element of a big bridge between our nations, a bridge of peoples’ friendship,” commented Aleksey Korchunov.

The consul general also met with NMSTU students who study German.

Author of the original article: Svetlana Artemova,
Information Policy Office