Friday, September 28, 2018

Learning How to Advertise in Russia and Much More

I have been trying to catch up with everything I needed to do while I was ill, therefore I barely had time to think about this blog.

My advancement in Russian language has stagnated, even gone worse, but that was expected. Got contact with teacher that has course, where I can practice communication. For a week now, I have been using Google translator to communicate in shops, instead of looking the vocabulary in advance. I just have been so tired of "studying" 24/7 and therefore gave myself a break.

Back to my work:

So, I was signed as the coordinator for one exchange program in Finland. This actually has been really interesting project to get to know Russia. In Finland the students needs to seek the information about the exchange opportunities themselves - here in Komi, we seek the students to go for the exchange programs:

We look up everything for them in advance, such as how much money approximately they would need during the exchange. Basically, anything they need to know. It may sound odd, but going abroad is not that common here and to get it established as common thing, well, it needs work! Therefore, we also have to help the students. So starting from making advertisement for the social media and the screens (that shows adverts on the corridors of the university). For this I actually requested to have a logo's or pictures for use from the target university, but I got the basic Finnish answer:

Ask them to look from the internet. *sigh * It just does not work that way in here... I also made the first draft for the ad, and this gave me the opportunity to learn what is seen as appealing ad in here. I have not the ability to write such things, but this is for learning and that is what I am doing. So now I can compare my version to what is seen as good ad! Cannot wait to get to do another one.

We have had a bit of a hurry with the schedule for the exchange program and therefore, the result for the Tuesday's meeting with the Head of Department, was for me to leave at ones to present the opportunity at the department of languages and the head of that department referred me to the English language teacher, who kindly invited me to give an ad hoc presentation on the subject. I was also invited to present the program to second group on Wednesday and was really pleased to hear that the Tuesday's group had 10 interested students and there was several on the second group too! When the starting point was that they are lucky if getting one student to present for the  receiving university.

This led me to my second task, which I presented to my team and was accepted: I start gathering all the possible exchange programs and collect them into one document to have advertisement of them and thus to present more than one opportunity for the student. To spread the knowledge of these, especially the ones, which provides grands to assist the students with the expences.

After the presentation, I had a lunch and prepared for the Master Class, which I gave to the students and entrepreneurs in the newly founded business incubator. My subject was, what it takes to have a startup in Finland and especially growth pains. I am really waiting to learn how it is here and currently, there is one Innovation Forum called Innovatika on, in which I was invited to give this speech. Not yet using Russian, but had translated my PowerPoint, and had a help from our department as Mikhail was the interpreter for me. He did well when thinking I was talking about special subject: startup, technology and financing with all the lovely jargon included in it - of course!

The Innovatika is similar to Finnish ones and I am going to have a post about it too in soon future.

 Just love the buzz!


Opening ceremony


All and all, I am going to enjoy every moment of it. :) Oh and the heating is working!

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