This text is about emotional bias, a bit of data analysis and reflections on my past studies.

What do you see on the graph above? Well, first you need a context. While I was studying my economics degree Telegram was my main communication tool. Teams in office during the day and telegram all other time. We have org chat for the all students, for particular subject, sometimes for specific projects and for sure with some co-students. Above is a chat with my uni-partner, Yulia with whom I chatted and talked mostly. Yulia lives in Ufa and she is an Associate Professor in Ufa’s University. Due to various reasons we started to chat at the beginning and then we worked together on many projects along our study and finally we did together the Master Thesis. This chart shows number of our messages per week.

Now you know. What do you see?

Maybe you see a New Year break Maybe you see a huge pike in May 2022, session Maybe you see something else, feel free to share if you want

What I see? As said I’m biased. You name it.

I see a lot of work, if we assume that number of messages is a proxy for an effort. By the way our chat with Yulia is 1.5x bigger in count than the chat for the whole curriculum. I see “getting to know each other period” and start of hard-work, I see peak at the end of first year and think that’s probably a mix of emotions exchange and all work we had to finish by the end of the year. I clearly see the summer gap. I see that second year was a bit easier to go. We learned how-to from the first and I actually planned the first one to be harder from curriculum hours. I see our work on final thesis, well planned and therefore stable and steady with an increase intensity approaching the deadline. But my eyes always comes back and glue to the last weeks in February 2022. Even though on the day when the war started it doesn’t seem that our chat changed much (22 Feb-21). I checked our messages on that week - I think we were hiding our shock behind another project we need to accomplish. Next week it was just a very few messages and in short it was exchange of “it’s fucked up” messages.

I’ve started to study in the best university in Russia. It wasn’t even very bad on a world scale not Harvard for sure though ;) But then in February 2022 everything changed. It’s all became meaningless. What matters only when this bloody war will be over. Nobody knows when and how it will be then but I hope Russia will stop attacking Ukraine.

When you hear that people in Russia supports war - yes for sure some people do. But dead silence for four weeks in our all-students chat tells me that not everybody does.

I would not recommend anyone to start a study in HSE know but I definitely would recommend to learn. To learn something new, something that has purpose for you, something that is interesting for you and what you are passionate about. The most important experience we could get is to meet different people - and if you go and study what you like you’ll meet others who sharing your passion or even more passionate than you. It’s priceless!

That was a random reflection triggered by a chart I’ve created to for a presentation to share with other young graduates. Yes I deceive you - this is not about biases it’s about everything but including bias. I just need this text to be here.