Student Internship Reports

Experiential learning, project based learning and internships are part of mandatory components at the Higher School of Economics both for masters’ and bachelor students. Students acquire professional skills and networks withit the field of their majors. Work study at HSE University, including RAs and TAs, can be counted as an internship. Today we talk about company internships with students. What is their experience, how they got there and how internships can help them in their future professional career

Nikita Popkov, first year student Agrarian Economics master program

Internship helped me see the processes in the agricultural sector from a different perspective. All my life I have been living in Moscow, and it is often difficult to understand the problems that arise in the field. Thanks to the internship, I better understand life in Russia in rural areas and the difficulties that companies face, both at the staff level and at the level of the company. If I continue to work in agrarian economics this experience will be instrumental to accurately assess the situation in the agricultural sector. This gives me a competitive advantage over other candidates who have only a very basic understanding of what is happening on the ground in agricultural companies.

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I did my HSE internship at the Oka Moloko company, or rather, in its eastern division in the Shatsky district of Ryazan region in Russia. The company is part of the EkoNiva Holding and is engaged in both milk production and the cultivation of various crops. My program, Agrarian Economics, helped me with the search and the process of finding a job. I was offered a choice of several companies which already agreed to host interns. I chose EkoNiva, passed a short interview, and was invited to an internship at the Ryazan branch.

Practice was held as an assistant economist. I lived in a hostel at the production base, where the equipment for harvesting and primary processing of grain is located. I worked in a small administrative building of the company located nearby. Most of the time I helped to calculate the indicators that economists needed for reports and analysis. I have analyzed the yield of different crops in all available fields and in different farms of the company over the past few years. Based on this, I was able to make an alternative forecast of the possible yield in 2022 in addition to the usual forecast, which is made on the basis of standard baseline indicators. I also calculated fuel consumption during various procedures to compare these data with the target and expected values. In addition, he helped with the digitization of paper or scanned reports and with the organization of information from many files and sources into one consolidated file. During my internship, I was invited to field trips and to dairy production in the residential complex "Shatsk", which is the largest livestock complex in the Central Federal District of the Russian Federation. There I was introduced to the full life cycle of animals from calves to cows and saw how the animals were kept, how the milking process took place, and how the computer system for accounting for milk operated.

As a person who has lived all his life in Moscow, it was difficult for me at first to adapt to life in a hostel and in the countryside. Over time, I was able to get used to it, and by the end of the practice it no longer caused any problems.

During my undergraduate studies at the Higher School of Economics, I already had an internship, and I also had experience working in a company during my studies, but both were in Moscow, and therefore differed quite a lot from my experience at EkoNiva. My past experience in the field of trading and market analysis came in handy here as well.

Alfred Adamptey, second year student Strategic Corporate Finance master program

I had my internship at Ernst and Young Valuation and Advisory Services LLC. The opportunity was given to me by one of my project supervisors at HSE who is a Director in that company.

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