The 2021 HSE Best Lecturer Competition has summed up its results. Sixty-six lecturers became winners in two categories and five in three, including Daniil Yesaulov of ICEF. Here is what Daniil thinks he owes his best lecturer award to, why ICEF students are special, and what modern teachers should be like.
I am very grateful to all the guys who voted for me – the students and the alumni of ICEF. Your assessment is always motivating and energizing and has been especially important in the past academic year, when online classes alternated with offline ones. Judging by their feedback, the students liked not only the background image in my Zoom room, they said they liked the classes and found them interesting and useful despite the difficulties of the mixed learning. I in turn felt their involvement on the other side of the screen.
Daniil Yesaulov earned his master’s from ICEF after completing a bachelor’s degree at Moscow State University. He then did a PhD at Moscow State University Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics to return to ICEF as a lecturer. Every year, Daniil wins students vote as the best lecturer of ICEF. Daniil teaches a course in Quantitative Finance and seminars: Mathematics for Economists, Linear Algebra, Financial Mathematics, and Asset Valuation.
The award I value most is definitely Alumni Choice. I am still in touch with some of the members of the earlier classes by the way. It’s a pleasant bonus of a lecturer’s job and always a pleasure to encounter your former students on the street or at an event.
My experience as a first-time teacher, when I was faced with typical problems of the teacher’s job I never thought existed as a student, made me re-consider the world of academia. The students in my group are all different in character and training, and they need to be approached individually. Only in this way can the transfer of knowledge be effective.
It isn’t okay for a lecturer to have an ‘I don’t care’ attitude
A lecturer should be thinking of ways to involve and encourage his every student, to arouse interest in his course and to make his lectures captivating. And these are only some of the important tasks before him.
I would define a modern teacher as someone who is not only a professional and loves what he teaches, but as someone who is versatile, charismatic, energetic and knows who to motivate and develop constantly.
I would like to give very special thanks to Alexey Kipriyanov. His term paper, which I was a supervisor of, earned me a place among the winners in the third nomination –Best Academic Supervisor of the Student Research Paper Competition winning paper. I am glad that Alexey’s graduation thesis, supervised by Sofia Budanova, turned out a solid work and received high ranking during the defense. I think his paper stands every chance of winning the next thesis competition. As a lecturer at ICEF, I witness the level of student research papers grow from year to year, which is cool!
Best lecturer status has been awarded to a total of 599 members of HSE teaching staff. Of them, 488 are recognized as such by student vote, 77 by alumni vote, and 110 are scientific supervisors of the best of student research papers.
Along with Daniil Yesaulov (ICEF), the winners in three nominations include Alexandra Staruseva-Persheeva and Lyubov Tsyganova (Faculty of Communications, Media and Design); Evgeny Osin and Elena Tarasenko (Faculty of Social Sciences). The three nominations are Best Lecturer according to student vote, Best Lecturer according to alumni vote, and Best Academic Supervisor according to the results of Student Research Paper Competition.
For more about voting results click here.
I’m glad that Alexey is going to continue his studies as a master’s student. As someone who did his master’s here at ICEF, I fully understand the importance of researcher skills in one’s studies and at the final stage of the programme when one is about to enter the workforce or PhD studies. ICEF’s international academic environment does stimulate research thinking in its students.
It is a great pleasure for me to be recognized best in as many as three nominations. I owe my win to my colleagues, who are the example for me to look up to, and to my wonderful students, of course. They are incredibly energetic people. Their being dedicated and caring is the reason why I feel excited about every class I am to deliver, even on early Saturday mornings. If there is ever “best students” nomination, for me the winners are clear. They are the guys from ICEF.
Vadim Radaev, First Vice-Rector of HSE University
Significantly, the voting for best lecturers reasonably combines tradition and innovation. With voting by students, alumni and according to the results of Student Research Paper Competition as the basis since 2011, there are new features of the training process that are reflected in the updates to the voting rules.
One new feature this year is the intercampus courses that are being actively implemented at HSE. They allow our students to vote not only for the lecturers at their core campus, but also for the lecturers teaching outside it. The fact that students vote actively for both is very encouraging.
Another novel feature of the voting process is that it can now be participated by PhD students who completed their master’s studies last year. Their voice is not accounted for in the Alumni Monitoring questionnaire (since this questionnaire is intended for those who are no longer graduate students), but we take account of it and will continue to do so in the future as part of our PhD Students Monitoring.
.png "Daniil Yesaulov of ICEF won three nominations as best lecturer")