University of Oviedo: To collaborate with SPbU
The delegation from the University of Oviedo, Spain, has visited SPbU to discuss collaboration in education and research.
Today, there are a few agreements between Spanish and Russian universities and SPbU will become the first partner-university from Russia, said the Rector of the University of Oviedo Santiago García Granda.
“Founded in 1608, our university is one of the oldest universities in Spain. Our strong point is the humanities, but we are striving to develop other areas, among them the most promising seem engineering, medicine, and biotechnologies,” — said the Rector of the University of Oviedo.
The University of Oviedo is collaborating with a number of companies, in particular Asturian Federation of Entrepreneurs, he added, and it help develop the educational programme in a way that to meet the employers’ demands and provide students the opportunities to have internships at the companies.
The students must keep in touch with their prospective employers, and this is a sphere where we would like to share experience.
Rector of the University of Oviedo Santiago García Granda
The Deputy Rector for International Affairs told that we had similar university-employer collaboration schemes.
“As initiated by the Rector of SPbU Nikolay Kropachev, we open the educational councils of the educational programmes. They comprise the employers who define the scope how we should teach students: they can change our curricular, attend graduation exams and suggest topics for graduation theses. It helps keep our educational programmes up-to-date and remain competitive”, — said Sergei Andrushin.
Internationalization and international cooperation is vital for science today, said the Vice-Rector of the University of Oviedo José Borge López. The University of Oviedo is one of the first universities in Spain to participate in Erasmus, and they opened 6 master programmes as part of the Erasmus Mundus. Among 22 thousands of students, over 10 % are international students. The University of Oviedo is a member of the community of the Spanish universities that collaborate on the on-line education.
The parties discussed the opportunities for joint scientific supervision of the graduate and post-graduate students. SPbU has joint degree programmes with the universities of China and Europe, said Sergei Andrushin, but it is highly demanding to open and develop them, and joint supervision is an optimal solution today.
Besides, SPbU is interested in attracting post-doc students, while many SPbU’s post-doc students are eager to have internship abroad. The University has a number of big laboratories, in particular in biomedicine and translational medicine. Those who are the heads of the laboratories have their post-graduate and doctoral students who are interested in international collaboration. If we inform them about areas in science to collaborate and our research teams, we can implement a number of joint grant projects. Medicine can be one of the possible areas for collaboration.
They decided to hold a videoconference for the researchers who are interested in collaboration and to prepare a draft of collaboration between the universities.