St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University

I spent the day at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, a new potential partner in the Global Modules network. The day was a great success, thanks mainly to the efforts of our friend Anna Kholina. Here's a picture of her translation of the Global Modules information sheet into cyrillic, as well as a shot of her next to some of her own artwork. How I came here is classic academic networking, and proof positive of the value of presenting at conferences and making these personal visits. Some professors from Ringling College in Florida saw me present at a conference in Asheville, North Carolina - and they in turn invited me to come down to Florida to speak to the faculty about international education, and then some other professors I met down in Florida on my visit met Anna at yet another conference, and told her to get into contact with me - and now I'm here. Anyway, Anna met me at my hotel around noon and we tackled the St. Petersburg metro, which is not as beautiful as the Moscow metro system, but also a lot easier to figure out - just one stop east on the green line and five stops north on the red line - and, huzzah, we were at the university. The students are very technologically talented and thus they are a good fit for some of our Champlain College students in fields like multi-media graphics or e-gaming. I got to witness some of their work, including some stereoscopic efforts (3D to old folks like me) which were really quite impressive. The professors were quite generous with their time and the students were very friendly and responsive when I talked to them. However, one my fondest memories was sitting in the little kitchen off of Anna's office drinking tea and eating sweets both before and after my presentation. I'll be meeting the chair of the department and a couple other professors who were out of town today, and who graciously agreed to meet with me Saturday over a traditional Russian meal. Again, a very profitable day - topped off by an Italian meal, of all things, at a restaurant across the street from my hotel. The spaghetti carbonara came with an egg yolk on top of it, and the pasta was so hot that the egg was slowly cooking - never had it served that way before, but it makes sense and it was quite good. After that I went for a long walk on along the Nevsky Prospect to work off all the rich food I've been eating - I feel like I'm back in New Orleans again.