Polytech Without Borders: career guidance meetings for international students held at the university

In‑person career guidance events for international students of the preparatory department were held at the Resource Center for International Activities of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. The meetings, organized by the Office for Work with International Students (OWIS), were conducted in three languages — Russian, Chinese and English — which made it possible to cover all stages of admission for students from different countries as fully as possible.

During the event, future applicants received up‑to‑date information about application deadlines, entrance examinations, working with the Gosuslugi portal and the SPbPU applicant’s personal account. Special attention was paid to the rules for filling out applications, choosing fields of study, as well as the procedure for the expert evaluation of foreign education documents and visa extension. The attendees were also informed about student organizations, sports clubs and volunteer projects of the university.

The students of the preparatory department showed great interest in continuing their studies at Polytechnic University. We received many questions about admission to bachelor’s, specialist, master’s and doctoral programs, noted Nataliia Makhanova, Head of OWIS. Current international students also came to listen to our meetings; they wanted to help their compatriots with their choice. In the next academic year, we plan to hold such career guidance days not only in Russian, Chinese and English, but also in other languages.

More than 850 international students from 67 countries are studying at the SPbPU preparatory department. A few days before the event, the students filled out an online form in which they indicated the most pressing questions — from tuition fees to the number of state‑funded and fee‑based places in each field of study. The answers to these questions formed the basis of the presentation.

We hold such meetings in three languages because the cost of a mistake this year is very high: miss the application deadline by one day — you miss the main admission round; fail to extend your visa by August 1 — you risk being expelled from the country, commented Evgeniya Satalkina, Head of the International Education Office. Our task was not simply to list the dates, but to warn about the strict requirements of migration legislation and the new federal law on admission through Gosuslugi. The students asked very specific questions: what to do if you don’t have a SNILS, how to verify your profile, how long to wait for the exam results. We provided step‑by‑step instructions in Russian, Chinese and English — no one left without an answer.

The next stage is individual support of applicants when submitting applications from June 20 to August 7 and visa extension (until August 1).

Events of this format strengthen the reputation of SPbPU as one of the leading Russian universities open to intercultural dialogue and equal access to education in Russian, Chinese and English.