Who are Irkutsk’s new residents? Why African students have fallen in love with our city, where they live, study... and freeze?

Irkutsk has always been a student city, thanks to its nearly twenty institutes and universities and a reputation for higher education that extends – without exaggeration – to the other side of the planet. Our city’s universities educate young people fr om more than 30 countries in Central and East Asia, Africa, and the BRICS nations (an alliance of ten partner states: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the UAE, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Indonesia). These young people have come to the capital of Eastern Siberia not only to gain knowledge and professions useful in their home countries; they are also testing themselves against a completely different way of life—unprecedented frosts and snow, borscht, blini, and, of course, Siberian hospitality. Among the international students in our city, there are even those who consciously traded the opportunity to study in Moscow or St. Petersburg for Irkutsk. A reporter from the Irkutsk weekly met with these adventurous students from hot countries to find out how much they have transformed their lives and whether they have managed to plunge headfirst into Siberian realities.

Just imagine: a beautiful December day in Irkutsk – crisp, frosty, with knee-deep snowdrifts sparkling in the sun. Now, imagine coming here from the African continent, wh ere it is a constant +40°C in the shade or rains non-stop for days on end. Can you imagine that contrast? Our guests have experienced it all firsthand.

The students featured in this article study at the Baikal School of BRICS, which is part of the Irkutsk National Research Technical University (INRTU). Their study program is “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science”.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and its capabilities today. However, the program at the Baikal School of BRICS was created back in 2020 under the guidance of Professor Alexander Afanasiev. A team of co-authors led by Alexander Diomidovich began work on it in 2018. They studied and analyzed domestic and international developments in this increasingly popular field, becoming among the first in Irkutsk to launch an educational program focused on deep learning.

Since AI technology is developing rapidly, the teachers at the School of BRICS closely monitor the progress and regularly update the curriculum with new courses.

It is clear why young people from the other side of the world come to Irkutsk to study artificial intelligence: it is precisely here that they are taught the technologies building the future. International students enroll on a fee-paying basis under general rules, but later, if they achieve good results, they can transfer to state-funded spots – and yes, there are indeed such diligent students.

The interview with the students – Salamatu Awal (Ghana), Precious Mark (Nigeria), Nazih Errahel (Morocco), Mohamed Dora (Egypt), Ibrahim Tiamiyu (Nigeria) and Muhammad Bello (Nigeria) – was conducted by Konstantin Kulikov, a journalist for the Irkutsk weekly. He decided to test how well they appreciated the Siberian sense of humor, nurtured by the harsh continental climate and the icy wind racing through the ice ridges of Lake Baikal.

You can read the full article and learn about the students’ experience of life and study in Siberia on the Irkutsk weekly website.

Author of the article and photos: Konstantin Kulikov, a journalist for the Irkutsk weekly