The selective express survey made it possible to determine the names of people whom the most active students of the RANEPA consider their favorite teachers.

Professor of the VSKU RANEPA Maria Nikolaeva: The title of beloved teacher is dear to me, this is a great honor

The selective express survey made it possible to determine the names of people whom the most active students of the RANEPA consider their favorite teachers. In the list of 22 surnames, the professor of the Department of International Commerce of the Faculty Higher School of Corporate Administration Maria Nikolaeva appears. In an interview with the correspondent of the Presidential Academy website, she called herself a demanding teacher and explained the secret of the popularity of the VSKU among school graduates.

– Maria Andreevna, in the year of the decade of the Presidential Academy you were among the teachers beloved by students. How did you meet this message?

– It pleased me, this is a great honor. The title assigned to the most active students, whom no one stuck to anything, is especially expensive. On the other hand, if the survey covered everyone, including unsuccessful guys, then I would not be among my favorite. Why are you so sure? Probably because of my high demands. I try myself, but I also demand a lot in response. I would like students to own knowledge and be able to apply it in situations that model future professional activities.

Students and I conduct active scientific research. As a result, over the past two years, about 20 articles of my younger colleagues have been published in the media.

In May 2020, the issue of the magazine Production to food products, and this is the leading reviewed scientific publication, covering the most important events of the trade market, included two student works. One about the nutrition of the civilian population during the Great Patriotic War, and the other about the “blockade menu” in Leningrad. Students used not ready -made materials from the Internet, no. They proceeded from real food cards. The human body was calculated for the most important food substances contained in products issued by cards during the war to various categories of the population.

Thanks to student projects, both I and the listeners will learn a lot of new things. For example, young people conduct an examination of the assortment for a certain subgroup assigned to them in several stores. And, you know, there are very interesting works. It is known that the nomenclature of fermented milk products is wide. But the fact that, for example, according to sour cream and cottage cheese, it reaches 260 items, struck me.

– What is a student research? What are his tasks?

– In traditional commodity studies, the characteristic of goods at the species level has still been preserved.But in the years of active development of the market, a huge number of varieties of goods, brands and their modifications appeared. And, unfortunately, no one studies it. I have developed an original author's methodology for researching the range of key products in the consumer basket. Both bachelor's and master's students are happy to work on it, examining the assortment of stores of modern format retail chains. It is important that stores are within walking distance of each other and can be considered as competitors.

– And how is the census of the assortment?

– If there are price lists on the Internet, then everything is simple. But most of the time they don't, much to my surprise. As a rule, students come to a chain store and either copy or photograph product labels on the spot. Houses enter data into a table of the established form, after which they calculate the coefficients of novelty, stability, completeness, depth, rationality and harmony of the product range. Then they develop their recommendations to the heads of trade enterprises. I want to emphasize that this is a pure exclusive, unique data. You can't google this on the Internet.

But for us it is an educational activity. Creative search. It develops both personal and professional competencies of future marketers, managers, merchants, logisticians.

Let's get back to the classroom. How do you manage to maintain a high level of their practical orientation?

– In general, I use, speaking in pedagogical language, an explanatory and illustrative method with elements of problem-search learning. Practical examples prevail. I support any theoretical position with the experience of specialists, including our students (my former students), media publications, speeches at seminars for trade practitioners.

I aggravate the questions without fail, I put the listeners before the inevitability of making a choice, of self-determination. This activates the memory mechanisms. I never sit at lectures – I walk freely in front of the front rows, maintaining visual contact with the audience.

I remember Professor Nikolai Ivanovich Kozin, a prominent chemist and commodity specialist, developer of new technologies for the production of margarine (today his portrait adorns the interiors of the UN), gave me, then still young and inexperienced, advice for life. He was present at my first open lecture at the Plekhanov Moscow Institute of National Economy (MINKh – now PRUE). After the lecture by N.I. Kozin delicately hinted at the fact that I did not tear myself away from the abstract. Get rid of him, you don't need him. . That's when I made a promise to myself to transform my strictly by text teaching genre into a free conversation with periodic posing of problematic questions to students that cause them intellectual difficulties.

– Do you have personal ethical rules, a teacher's moral code?

– Honesty in relationships, adherence to principles and exactingness are the most important moral principles.

– What about hobbies? What do you prefer to do in your free time?

– As a child, spending holidays with my grandmother in Rybinsk, on the banks of the Volga, I collected rare pebbles. I thought about geology and biology. Then my parents advised me to enter the faculty of merchandise. I do not regret. And I still study pebbles, but already as a buyer and an amateur.

I have many hobbies. With my grandchildren (there are six of them and one great-grandchild), while they were growing up, I always turned into a storyteller when we went out for a walk. But even now it continues. Secondly, I love my dacha. Marigolds, asters, how they blaze. Theater, concerts at the House of Scientists, where I sometimes give lectures, books.

– Which of the outstanding colleagues, business leaders is close to you in terms of worldview?

– The area of ​​​​my professional interests – strictly speaking – is marketing at the junction with merchandising. But such disagreement reigns in this area that, as they say now, I’m not ready to name the “top” figure for myself offhand. Although, if you remember the departed, there was such a person: professor, doctor of technical sciences Vasily Georgievich Speransky – my informal teacher.

I liked the way he lectured, his attitude towards people at the “professor-assistant” level. He remains my ideal both as a person and as a scientist, although he was not my supervisor.

– How do you explain the growing popularity of the Graduate School of Corporate Management among applicants? What makes it different from other educational institutions?

– I believe that the teachers of the school place a rather high level of demands on future specialists. Let me cite my own experience as an illustration. I have developed a system in which you can pass all the topics during the semester even before the exam. This is not an automatic, but a variant of a stretched exam. And up to 50% of young people voluntarily switched to this model, which draws them into intensive classes not on the eve of the test, but during the semester. Thanks to this, one of the most important principles of didactics is realized – continuity and systematic training.

Hence the corresponding reputation among students. They become happy to learn. And secondly, the main direction of the school is trading. And this is the broadest prospects, the possibility of employment. Judge for yourself: revenue from trade is a quarter of GDP. Factories, plants, service industries – all sell their goods and services. And by this circumstance, the employment of our specialists is greatly facilitated.

– How are your relations with technology developing during periods of forced remote work?