Vadim Voskresensky PhD and work in Berlin

Vadim Voskresensky spent almost 7 years in the St. Petersburg State University. He finished his bachelor's and master's degrees and wrote his diploma with Daniil Alexandrov. He began teaching students in his second year of master's program, under the guidance of Ilya Musabirov. After the graduation, he continued teaching even more actively - the Data Science minor course, "Information Systems" course. Vadim worked at Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science for most of his teaching time. In the spring of 2018, at the suggestion of Daniel Alexandrov, he left to work and to write his PhD at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. It is a research institute that brings together scientists from universities in Berlin and Brandenburg. One of the main ideas of the institute is that people from different disciplines are involved, so they can interact with each other, share experiences and results, and have fun.

Sharing skills and expertise

 

The group in which Vadim works at the research institute also brings together specialists from different scientific fields. The team includes people from Communication science and Public policy. One of the projects they are working on covers the similarities and differences between the communication of right-wing parties in six European countries: Germany, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Italy, and France. While senior colleagues were working on the theoretical framework, Vadim and other PhD students were developing a methodology. According to Vadim, discussing ideas, theory and hypothesis was a complicated process - more complicated than the analysis itself. 

 

"Communicating with people from different fields is an important skill. It requries the ability to explain the essence of personal activity, some methodological aspects of the work. Memers of the team should be good at describing the code for work. It can be understood by people who are on the first stages of programing. At the same time, we should listen to each other, think about theoretical framework of the research, think more about the literature that's being used."

 

One more variable that makes the process of working and studying harder is English language. Members of the team are not only professtional in different fields, but also people with different cultures and languages. According to Vadim's experience, it is helpful to be able to set up a dialogue in a non-native language.

 

"I worked and studied in St. Petersburg, so the communication was in Russian. Here I learned to communicate in English, to discuss projects in English. My colleagues learned this too, because now only one member of the group is a native speaker. He is from Australia. The rest of the team are all Germans. English is more usual for them, and for me not so much. It's an important skill to work in English, to write in English."

 

Data science for social good

 

Vadim does not limit his potential within the walls of academia. Starting from the idea that it is possible to work wider than the scientific field allows, Vadim directs his energies to the applied, useful for society direction.

 

Data science for social good is a project that unites data scientists with representatives of nonprofit organizations. The latter always have insights on how to do something useful for society, to improve things. More than that, nonprofit organization may have a lot of data, but they do not have the skills of data analysis and machine learning. On the other side there are scientists who are trained to manipulate with data, but they work on things that make money, or they work on academic projects.

 

"Science for social good is about how analysts can help non-profits. It is an interesting challenge - figuring out how to interact with such non-profits, how to do events for them. I'm interested in that right now, I'm thinking about it, and I've been involved in some of the events."

 

SatRday Conference

 

During his stay in Berlin, Vadim met people interested in working with data - he went to relevant meetings and spent the evenings over a cup of conversation about analytics and data science. In the result, these meetings grew into an entire conference on working with R in Data Science last June. Conference was purposed to discuss how to use the R programming language for Data Science tasks.

 

"The conference is called SatRday - it's the kind of conference that's organized by the local community. Saturday happens in Amsterdam, in Budapest. We organized the first conference of this kind in Berlin, and we are going to do it in 2020. We will create a new version, considering all the problems and difficulties of organizing the first one. I think we will do it even better. Although the first one wasn't bad either."

 

What about German language?

 

At first, English was enough for Vadim's needs - for work, for studying, for life. He took a light course of German with one lesson a week and made regular, incremental progress, but did not devote much time to it. He attended class, but did not read at home, or write, or listen in German. Everything about was connected to English language. The circumstances changed when Vadim got a course in media and political communication on his schedule last October.

 

"The whole course was in German. When I started attend it, I was disturbed by the fact that I did understand nothing. I thought that I have been living in Germany for two years, and I still do not know the language. It made me very sad, so I decided to surround myself with German. I signed up for an intensive course in December, practiced German every day for three hours. Now I have classes from Monday to Thursday, that is, every four days - 12 hours of German a week. I read books, listen to podcasts. I feel like I'm getting much better at German."

 

"Finding a balance between work and daily hobbies."

 

When Vadim is not working, he's learning. For example, playing tennis. Useful work is combined with enjoyable work, and the mental effort in the schedule alternates with sports. 

 

"A lot of time is spent on team projects. It is hard to work on both team projects and a thesis at the same time. They are related, but still. Plus, I would like to have free time for hobbies: study German, learn to program better, go to sports. I try to find a balance between work and daily hobbies. Also, Berlin suits my musical tastes, there are great events with musicians. Before, I could only dream of seeing them live, but now I get to see all my favorite musicians."

 

The universe also keeps a balance, so working abroad is not limited to the pleasant experience of meeting people from different countries and meeting favorite musicians. Vadim admits that he misses his family, his friends, as well as HSE and Laboratory. Most of Vadim's friends are connected to the university and the Laboratory.

 

In April 2018, Vadim already shared his experiences of working at HSE in St. Petersburg and continuing his studies in Berlin, why he made this decision and what he will miss most (read it here https://slon.hse.ru/news/225325145.html). In October 2018, he said about the bureaucratic hardships and the conference in Oxford (click here - https://slon.hse.ru/news/218108862.html)