Society

Indonesia is indeed much more than Bali and its picturesque beaches. Yet very few of us know that in the mouth of one of the country’s volcanoes there is a lake of sulphuric acid.

On Wednesday, 17 June, the International Forum-Contest “Topical Issues of Rational Use of Natural Resources” will take start.

South Korea has been traditionally occupying leading positions in global rankings based on IQ levels of its citizens. Education has become a cult in this country: a school day may start at 7:30 am and end at 10 pm. But which is even less believable, there is a school employee who walks around classrooms, checks on pupils and wakes them up if they fell asleep. Where does this attention to education come from and what it ends in?

Botswana is the second-largest diamond producer in the world after Russia. Hence the country managed to build up one of the most successful economies on the African continent. Authorities are, however, concerned of its one-sidedness… Judging by the country’s standards, Leepile Mompati Keeme has a tiny family – his parents gave birth to ’only’ five children. While there are numerous universities and colleges in Botswana, only one of Leepile’s brothers graduated from a local university. The others went to study abroad, having chosen either China, South Africa or the US.

Turkmenistan is often compared to North Korea based on the level of the country’s isolation. There is very little information about the state, and its reliability is often hard to check. For instance, not a single COVID-19 case has been registered there, but rumours say petrol is shared freely among citizens. Leyla Aliyeva, a student at Saint-Petersburg Mining University, explains which stories are real and which are only imagination.

Life has become a success story for a young man from Côte d’Ivoire. As a child, he used to help his family on corn plantations. Some 15 years later, he is a PhD student at St. Petersburg Mining University who got a chance to shake hands with a Nobel laureate in physics.

An Iraqi Kurd has told the story of how he ended up studying at Saint-Petersburg Mining University. What is he doing to preserve his cultural identity on the way to fulfilling a lifetime dream - to become an oil & gas specialist?

Ragchaa Byambadorj was born in Mongolia, the country which is still mostly covered by unpopulated deserts and steppes, and where about a third of inhabitants continue practising a nomadic lifestyle. The big question is, why would he want to return home after graduating?

On Wednesday, April 15, the Russian stage of the International Forum-Contest of Young Researchers “Topical Issues of Rational Use of Natural Resources” will take start. For the first time in sixteen years, due to the spread of the coronavirus, its delegates are not coming to St. Petersburg but will remotely report on their scientific research. The Webex platform, which allows holding online conferences with up to three thousand participants, was provided by Cisco, one of the global leaders in the development of network telecommunication systems. Dmitry Razumovsky, Head of Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility Programs in Russia and the CIS, told Forpost about the factors that affect the quality of conferences in virtual space.

Before changing his life drastically and moving to St. Petersburg, Jerson Martínez Parry, a student from Columbia, graduated from the Educational Corporation Indoamericana (Corporación Educativa Indoamericana) and the Institute of Languages and Culture named after Leo Tolstoy (Instituto Cultural León Tolstoy).