I was born in Taganrog, in the south of Russia, and received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Systems Analysis from the Southern Federal University (former Rostov State University). Throughout my undergraduate studies I focused on getting a strong foundation in such disciplines as mathematical analysis, logic and automation, computational networks and other subjects I saw myself practicing in the future. The most tragic thing for me to witness was data visualization and analysis — I could not figure out how such valuable results could be delivered by professionals in such an ugly and non-descriptive way. Skoltech popped up with its program just when I needed it.

In 2013, I joined the Skoltech Master of Science in Computer Science and Data Visualization program [editor's note: now Data Science]. The student life and opportunities at Skoltech swept me away before I knew it. I joined the Student Council, became a member of winning teams at several hackathons that were organized in partnership with Skoltech and even took an academic mobility trip to MIT (but that's a story for another time).

Towards the end of my academic career, I helped to organize the admissions process — Selection Weekends — and fell madly in love with Skoltech people and the admissions team that worked hard from the very start of Skoltech. I've made life-long friends during these activities, and we still keep in touch, several years later.

At Skoltech, I learned that a career journey has to be a deliberate one, always with the end goal in mind. That's why I searched for opportunities that directly related to my interests in data science. At one point in 2014, I joined Yandex as a Product Development Manager for a 6-month internship. The main task during my internship was to create a technology that would distinguish user interests based on the themes that existed in the Yandex-user statistics, then separate and make rankings more sophisticated on all existing web-pages.

The next step in my career journey was at the Data Analysis Center under the City of Moscow, where I was a data analyst and key account manager. During that time, I worked on such influencing projects as the development of computer vision medical recognition systems, neural network tools for lung cancer detection and ECG analysis.

These work experiences have led me to my current job at Gazprom Neft. For the past 2 years, I've been serving as Lead of Data Science team. We develop neural network algorithms for optimization of oil and gas exploration. I am proud to say that my teams' work (past and current) is open for viewing and use by research groups and industry professionals. For instance, our libraries for the City of Moscow lung cancer detection project and ECG analysis are currently used by data science students for medical algorithms and in demonstrations of the possibilities of medical computer vision. Our Gazprom Neft solutions can be found here.

In the future, I want to make as many available technologies for applied research as possible in order to maximize the impact of my work and see its effect in the community.

If I were to describe my experience at Skoltech in three words, it would be: fun, unlimited, and uprising. For me, Skoltech was an amazing example and school for "communicating your way" with business. As first-year students, we had no limits on what we were allowed to do. That was the best part.

Skoltech is different from other universities: it taught me how to "see" opportunities beyond what's in the textbook and grasp them much like we do now in real life. Of course, some people were unhappy with "uncertainty", but as it turned out when you start a real job, "nothing is certain" and Skoltech made me ready for that.

Nowadays, I imagine a lot of incoming students are afraid of the challenges Skoltech will present to them. But my advice to them is to let go of their fears, enjoy the moment and, really, make the best of their time, no matter what people say. That's what the best years of our lives are for, isn't it?