Student Brigades

As the brigade commander, I was responsible for our professional skills training and social life. The university supported my initiatives and provided with the necessary funding. Thus, I was able to participate in Student Brigade Leader Schools in Yekaterinburg and Perm while all my 14 brigade members could complete a Professional Plasterers and Painters Program at a technology college in Moscow. At MEPhI, we organized various events to learn about each other and build a strong team. In Summer 2013, I got us a job within the All-Russian Student Construction Project “Akademicheskiy” in Yekaterinburg. It was the same place where I took my KSTA team before.

The Summer was hot in terms of both weather and everything happening in our brigade. Engineering physicists turned out to be true romantics, adventurers, and full of joy and creativity people. We built, played, danced, cared for each other, hiked, sang songs around the campfire, and spent time with many other teams. Some students found love and eventually formed families. Other students became the closest friends. On the construction site, we performed the best, won the All-Russian competition, and returned to Moscow as heroes. It was a great time.

In Fall 2013, I started a Student Brigades Staff as a commander to facilitate the development of student brigades at MEPhI branches. By Fall 2014, we got 10 student brigades of over 300 students total. We organized our own Brigade Leader School, MEPhI Student Movement Museum, different meetings and creativity events for the brigades' members. I started our magazine by writing its first issue and, as a producer and a director, contributed to a documentary film about the participants of MEPhI brigades existed before the 90s to preserve the history.

To secure paid summer work for the brigades, I met with the representatives of the State Atomic Energy Corporation ROSATOM to discuss the opportunity for MEPhI engineering physicist students to participate in the construction of nuclear power plants in Belarus, Novovoronezh, and Rostov. I also met with the President V. Putin to discuss the possibility for Russian Student Brigades to take part in the reconstruction of homes destroyed in flooding in the Russian Far East. Both meetings led to establishing partnership contracts between the students and corresponding organizations.

In the winter of 2013 and 2014, I worked as a volunteer in cold Altai Krai (-30 °C) being a part of a student team “Gulf Stream”. We helped veterans and elderly people living alone with household chores. We also organized concerts and games for children in the villages.

Reflection: The Russian Student Brigades movement was one of the brightest parts of my student life. It gave me the best friends and unforgettable memories. It also taught me how to build and lead a team, find and get a job for us, take care of our professional skills training and social life, carry responsibility for everything and everyone in summer trips including the management of the work on a construction site. I believe that those experiences were valuable and would help me in many situations ahead including research and teaching processes.

However, since the organization of the Student Brigades Staff, I started to notice that I devoted too much time and energy to the movement instead of growing as a professional and pursuing my true carrier dream. Therefore, in late Spring 2014, I left the movement and have never returned to it again. The brigades and the Staff formed at MEPhI at my time are still functioning and many other brigades have appeared since then.