IDLab Seminar Helps Students to 'Cook Up' Their First Research

Evgeniya Shenkman, Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics and Finance and Junior Research Fellow at IDLab, spoke about the 'Cooking Up Your First Research' student seminar, which she organised this year. Evgeniya explains what happens at the seminar, who participates in it, and what students gain from it.

The 'Cooking Up Your First Research' student seminar was first held at HSE University-Perm in September 2021. The creator and moderator of the seminar is Evgenia Shenkman, Junior Researcher at IDLab.

During the seminar, enthusiastic students share interesting scientific papers, study new research methods, share their ideas and show their preliminary work. The workshop started with five students who were IDLab research assistants. Now, the seminar is regularly attended by about 12 people, including students from Perm, St Petersburg and Moscow. Most are from the Bachelor’s programme in Economics at HSE University-Perm, but the seminar is open and everyone is welcome.

'I have wanted to organise a seminar like this for a long time. It seems to me that students can be a huge help to each other in their research—not only those who are engaged in similar topics, but also those in completely different fields. Very often, when listening to a report on a subject completely unfamiliar to you, you instinctually begin to apply it to your research, and, lo and behold, it can turn out to be very interesting. Simply put, this seminar broadens your horizons,' Evgeniya Shenkman explains.

For the first six months, the seminar took the format of a reading seminar. Participants analysed theoretical articles on various economic issues (including information disclosure, staff turnover, the CAPM financial model and more), discussed the difficult points of the articles, and learned how to present research in parallel. The following six months, the participants iteratively showed their first steps in scientific research, checking interesting questions with the group, asking for methodology tips, sharing their developments and asking each other whether or not something was logical. IDLab staff also joined the seminar and gave feedback on the presentations.

Evgenia Shenkman: “What makes me happy? At the end of the seminar, I invite everyone to ask their final questions and give their final comments and compliments. And they do—five to seven minutes earlier, they might have been arguing and disagreeing (part of the standard working environment), and then they're supporting each other and wanting to continue. It's an absolutely incredible atmosphere.”