Student seminar "Cooking up your first research" by IDLab
Evgenia Shenkman, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics and Finance and Junior Research Fellow at IDLab, spoke about the student seminar she organized this year. She talked about what happens at the seminar, who participates in it, and also about what it gives students from her point of view.
Since September 2021, the student seminar “Cooking up your first research” has started at HSE University-Perm. The initiator and moderator of the seminar is Evgenia Shenkman, junior researcher at IDLab.
At this seminar, a group of enthusiastic students share interesting scientific papers, study new research methods and share their ideas, show preliminary calculations. The workshop started with 5 students, IDLab Research Interns. Now the seminar is regularly attended by about 12 people, students from Perm, St. Petersburg and Moscow, most of them from the Bachelor’s programme Economics in HSE University-Perm. But the seminar is open, and we invite everyone.
Evgenia Shenkman: “I have long wanted to organize such a seminar. It seems to me that students can wonderfully help each other in their research, and not only those who are engaged in a similar topic, but also in a completely different area too. Very often, when listening to a report on an area completely unfamiliar to you, you involuntarily begin to apply it to your research, and, lo and behold, it can be very interesting. And simply, this seminar is very broadening one's horizons.”
For the first half a year, the seminar had the format of a reading seminar, it analyzed theoretical articles on various economic issues: information disclosure, staff turnover, the financial model of CAPM and others; discussed the difficult points of the articles, and simply learned how to present research in parallel. In the second six months, the guys iteratively showed their first steps in scientific research: who checked an interesting question on the audience or not, who asked for a hint with the methodology, who showed theoretical and calculations and asked to check whether it was logical? IDLab employees also joined the seminar and gave their feedback on the presented presentations.
Evgenia Shenkman: “What makes me happy? At the end of the seminar, I invite everyone to ask the last questions, comments, admiration. And you know, admire. That is, 5-7 minutes ago they could argue and disagree, the standard working environment, and then they support and wish not to stop there. Absolutely incredible atmosphere.”