Yandex Supports Young Talents

Internet, March 19, 2007. Yandex announces the start of a large-scale campaign to support talented young people. The project started yesterday with awarding the winners of the 70th Moscow Mathematical Olympiad in the Main Buidling at Moscow State University. All winners received Yandex signature T-shirts reading ”Ya — matematik” (”I am a mathematician”).

In 2007 Yandex will take part in holding the largest olympiads on international, federal, and regional scale. In doing this, Yandex will pay most attention to company's prioriy disciplines — mathematics, computer programming, and linguistics.

Specialists in these fields are in demand at modern IT-companies, including Yandex. For that matter, it may very well be that, for olympiad participants, support from Yandex will become an extra argument for in choosing a future profession. Many people at Yandex, in their due time, used to win or participate in similar contests, and this experience turned out to be useful in their further work.

”It is difficult to overestimate the role of intellectual competitions in searching for and picking out gifted students, as well as in motivating them to profoundly study the disciplines further, and to choose their course of life. At that, the high prestige of the companies supporting and participating in olympiads is being founded,” asserts Ivan Yaschenko, director of Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education. ”This is exactly why we are choosing partners for holding olympiads very carefully. That is why we would be very pleased to receive support from Yandex, Russia's leading Internet-company.”

”Support programme for talented young people presupposes the ”school — university — work” sequence. If the most important for school students is to choose profession, then, university students need to obtain knowledge that will be appreciated by employers,” says Ludmila Shvetsova, head of HR department at Yandex. ”That is why Yandex is planning to recruit teachers for developing appropriate courses. In particular, we are already participating in the project of Academy for Modern Software Engineering in St. Petersburg. There is also student internship programme being developed in the company.”

In the near future, Yandex will be supporting school and university olympiads in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and in the Urals. Later on, the company will be developing academic cooperation with other regions in Russia.

Moscow Mathematical Olympiad takes place annually since 1935. For many years it has been the most important and the most popular intellectual competition for school students of Moscow. The active participants in holding the Olympiad are Moscow Mathematical Society and Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at MSU; throughout years the Olympiad committee was presided by Russia's leading mathematicians (A. Kolmogorov, B. Delone, V. Arnold, among others). (Information from website http://olympiads.mccme.ru/mmo/)

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