On October 22, the main events of the XIV Forum of Universities of Engineering and Technology of the Union State started at the Belarusian National Technical University.
The program of the day began with a press approach. Representatives of the Standing Committee of the Union State, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation made comments on the importance of the forum for modern engineering education and the development of science.
Alexey Kubrin, Deputy State Secretary of the Union State, member of the Union State Standing Committee, noted the uniqueness and practical significance of the forum:
– The forum is primarily aimed at training engineering personnel. Students and postgraduates from universities in Russia and Belarus will talk and show their work at the sections. It is also planned to hold so-called intellectual business battles, where various projects will be discussed, their quality and readiness for implementation in the near future will be evaluated. In other words, this forum has both elements of science and access to specific projects with specific technical solutions. This is a unique event. Even if you look on the Internet or study the history of the interaction of any universities in the world, you will find that there is no equivalent to the forum of technical universities.
During the press conference, First Deputy Minister of Education of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Bakhanovich noted the importance of engineering education for training specialists who make a great contribution to the development of the country's economy.
– The concept for the development of engineering education, which was recently adopted by the government for the next 10 years, the program for the creation of competence centers and other work that is currently being carried out in the Ministry of Education together with universities, leading enterprises, and personnel customers, certainly gives us results. We should start this work from an early age with future specialists. We can see how effectively our engineering classes have worked. Of the 2,500 graduates this year, more than 70% have enrolled in engineering and technical specialties. We involve our youth in engineering and technical education. In this sense, the forum of universities of an international technological profile is a platform where specialists meet and discuss a number of issues: personnel training, scientific research, innovative activities, youth innovative entrepreneurship. "First, we need to attract young people to both engineering and technical education and science, and then provide them with every possible support so that their idea, after passing through business incubators, startup projects, and mentoring programs with established scientists and educators, is first developed into a prototype, and then implemented in production and contributes to the country's economy," emphasized Alexander Bakhanovich.
The Rector of BNTU Sergei Kharytonchik noted the results of the past forums and outlined plans for the future.:
– Over the past years of the forum, we have achieved a lot of results. We ourselves began to train specialists in the field of nuclear energy for the Belarusian nuclear power plant. In the early stages, the R. E. Alekseev Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University took over the main aspects of our students' training. Gradually, we have adopted their experience and today we are independently training our students for this industry. Also, since the beginning of the forum, we have been very actively engaged in training specialists for the needs of the defense complex. There was no such field at our university, and our partner, Izhevsk State Technical University, named after M. T. Kalashnikov contributed to the creation of this field of study here. And another example of the success of the forum is the creation of an Advanced engineering school of the Union State in the field of hybrid machine tool construction. Today, machine tool manufacturing is the circulatory system of our entire industry, and in this direction we have created new training programs, focused on digitalization, and new methods of training our students. We have also created a hybrid processing center design. And today, together with our Russian partners, we are confidently training specialists in these areas. It seems to me that a period has come in the development of the Union State countries when we see that more intensive and in-depth training of engineers is urgently needed.
The role of the XIV University Forum events continued to be discussed at the opening ceremony and the plenary session that followed. During this time, distinguished guests delivered welcoming remarks and presentations.
A symbolic moment at the opening will be the handover of the forum's flag by BNTU Rector Sergei Kharytonchik to Mikhail Abramsky, Director of the Institute of Information Technology and Intelligent Systems at Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University.
Section work and many meetings to strengthen cooperation between countries await.
