"Double post-graduate student" from KuzSTU

Arina Smirnova is a graduate of KuzSTU. Last year she received her diploma with honors in Applied Geology. After that, she immediately entered the post-graduate school at KuzSTU. But this seemed not enough, and when the Shandong University of Science and Technology (China) started applications for Doctoral degree program, she decided to apply! Now Arina is a post-graduate student of two technical universities at once: Russian and Chinese.

As of today, Arina Smirnova is a teaching assistant at the Department of Mine Surveying and Geology of the Mining Institute of KuzSTU. In combination, the young teacher is also a researcher at the research laboratory for the digital transformation of enterprises in the mineral resource complex. Her scientific work there is organically connected with her postgraduate studies in the field of "Mining and oil and gas geology, geophysics, mine surveying and subsoil geometry." But a broad scientific nature always wants to test its capabilities in the largest possible space of theoretical and applied science. This opportunity was given to Arina in March 2022 by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) of the Shandong University of Science & Technology, a long-term partner of the Kuzbass State Technical University in science and education. There was one place in the post-graduate school with instruction in English specially reserved for a candidate from KuzSTU, and the young scientist-miner Arina Smirnova got it.

The Russian post-graduate program (in Russian, of course) was united with the Chinese post-graduate program (in English) by a similar topic of research in the mining industry. Hence, the scientific supervisors of the “double post-graduate student” Smirnova, the head of the department of mine surveying and geology of KuzSTU Tatyana Mikhailova from one side, and the scientific supervisor of the Shandong University of Science and Technology Prof. Chen Shaojie, from the other side, managed to get along quite well with each other. The final agreement took place in July this year. Here is how Arina herself recalls this recent process.

– After consulting with my colleagues from the digital transformation laboratory, who had already studied at Shandong University and completed their postgraduate studies there, I decided to collect the necessary package of documents and apply. The list of documents in English included a diploma of higher education and its supplements, two references, plus a curriculum. The references were written to me by Professor Aleksey Khoreshok, director of our mining institute, and Professor Markus Plien from the Technical Higher School named after George Agricola (Bochum, Germany), where I studied in 2018 and 2019 as an exchange student. I applied for the Doctoral program in Mining engineering. Simultaneously with the application, with the help of colleagues from the laboratory, we found a professor at Shandong University who agreed to become my supervisor. After submitting the application, I had an interview with my Chinese supervisor where we discussed the area of research. Chinese PhD studies will last from September 1 of the current year until July 2026. At the moment, I am waiting for the documents sent to me by mail to further apply for a visa.