The application period for Master’s programs at Tomsk State University ended on 12 August. Now the future masters are passing the entrance exams and awaiting the results with excitement.

The most popular Master’s degree programmes are those of the Law Institute (112 applications for 30 budgeted places), Faculty of Economics (124 applications for 30 places), and Faculty of Psychology (176 applications for 74 places). Other fields also have significant interest. For example, the Faculty of Geology and Geography received about 100 applications for the 80 places.  The Faculty of Innovative Technologies has 60 applications for 40 places.

The geography of students entering Master’s programmes at TSU has expanded. There are many applicants from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and other countries. Traditionally there are many students from China.

A total of about 200 students from 24 countries, including the Netherlands, Italy, Lithuania, Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria, Nigeria, and Turkey will enter the first year of a Master’s programme at TSU in 2015.

TSU accepts for its Master’s degree programmes the best, the most capable and motivated students to prepare for active scientific, research, and design work. TSU is consistently developing as a research university and improving the quality of Master’s education. In addition to traditional Master's programmes, students are trained in specialized programs. For example, there is a target Master’s programme in collaboration with JSC Gazprom Space Systems. TSU also has double degree programs with international partner universities. 12 faculties are actively developing such programmes.

Their uniqueness is that they are carried out not in one department, but in conjunction with laboratories and research and education centers. Graduates of these Master's programmes will receive innovative, universal educational skills in several disciplines at the same time, for example, in philosophy and computer sciences.

For the first time, TSU will provide an opportunity for distance study for a  Master's degree. This will be pioneered in 6 programmes in the Faculty of Physics and faculties of socio-humanitarian areas.

Admission to the budgeted places in the TSU Master’s programmes will be held on 19 August. Those who have not received the budget places but have successfully passed the entrance tests may qualify for fee-based training. On August 31 the enrollment of undergraduates studying on a fee basis will take place.
Read more: http://www.tsu.ru/content/tsu/

18 costumes of different peoples of Russia--Russian, Ukrainians, Tatars, and Mordovians--are presented at the exhibition of Russian Palette. Some items are more than a hundred years old. In addition, here you can also see the hand-embroidered towels. The paintings presented at the exhibition were written by Russian artists Ivan Kirillov and Maria Podkopayeva and devoted to the traditional way of life and costumes of the peoples of Russia.

The exhibition is located throughout most of the Library. The majority is located in the administrative hall (before the transition from the old to the new building), but some mannequins with costumes are displayed in the stairwells. According to the organizers, the exhibition was created especially for students to get acquainted with the folk traditions in different places, without coming to a special exhibit space.

The collection Russian Palette at the exhibition was additionally complemented by the library staff. They presented a thematic collection of books about Russian culture 24/7 in the data center in honor of the Ethnic Forum. The mobile exhibition Russian Palette will be in the Scientific Library TSU until the end of September: http://www.tsu.ru/content/tsu/

The Neurobiology Laboratory has been in the Institute of Biology and Biophysics of Tomsk State University for over a year: its employees are studying the processes of neurogenesis (recovery of a set of neurons in the brain) in animals. Great importance is attached not only to the process itself but also to the development of methods of intravital imaging. Another interesting aspect of the work is the role of new neurons in long-term memory. Now Nikolai Nemirovich-Danchenko, one of the young laboratory employees, is engaged in this area: http://www.tsu.ru/content/tsu/

Interest in research in the earth sciences and life sciences is rapidly increasing. For Tomsk State University, this field of research is one of the priorities for development, and the multidisciplinary approach has become a feature of this.

This approach is implemented in TSU’s centre of excellence Biota-Climate-Landscapes, created in 2014 based on the Institute of Biology and Biophysics.The interdisciplinary master's programme is now undergoing the design phase. It is planned to have a range of disciplines, where introductory lectures will be read by stars of world science and will be continued by TSU professors. For example a course, such as Winter Ecology by Terrence Callaghan, Nobel laureate, an honorary doctorate of TSU, possibly has no analogs in the world.

Organizers also expect to collaborate with Vladimir Romanovsky, Vice-President of the International Association of Permafrost, our compatriot working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks; Peter Glavatsky, a major polar explorer from the Warsaw Institute of Geophysics, who led the research station on Svalbard; and other well-known scientists.

The director of BioClimLand is confident that most of the courses will be distinguished by novelty and originality. For example, Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, a postdoc of the Centre, has already developed three courses for the master's programme, and one of them, Biodiversity in Theory and Practice, was launched last semester as a pilot project.

The programme will be open to undergraduate and graduate students from a wide range of specialties: it is primarily for biologists, hydrologists and ecologists, chemists, and radio physicists, but some subjects will be interesting and useful also for those in the humanities: http://www.tsu.ru/content/tsu/