The App That Got Me through My First HSE Year
The first morning, the very first day I became an HSE student, I got lost before I managed to leave the dorm.
Not in Moscow.
On my phone.
Telegram shouted in Russian and my mail had three URGENT letters with people with whom I had not experienced anything, one small but meaningful piece of information was under all that electronic racket: Where is my first class?
I was sitting on the bed, and staring at a very unresponsive HSE webpage which was loading slowly and a totally unhelpful Google Map. My room-mate was looking over the edge of the bunk-bed and said:
"Do you have App X?"
I blinked. "App... what?"
Every time she had been to an HSE, she sighed, as though it were her first visit. "Download it. Life will hurt less."
I figured that she was dramatizing.
She wasn't.
Meeting the Blue Icon
After two minutes I had another blue icon on the screen.
It demanded my HSE log in (which I had wrongly typed already on at least 10 websites). I gave it another attempt and all the academic life that I had was reorganised to perfect coloured rectangles.
Monday: two lectures, one seminar, three different buildings.
Tuesday: one terribly early lesson.
Wednesday: the strange room having no name of everybody but called the aquarium.
Up to that point, HSE was an immense abstract entity: modules, credits, ratings, god-frog building codes. App X transformed the mess into something that I could visually look at and properly organize: my name, my group, my classes, my classrooms.
"See?" my roommate said. "Now you won't get lost."
That was optimistic. I still got lost. But now, at any rate, as I ran up and down the tunnels like a lost Erasmus pigeon I knew fully which way I was to go.
The Labyrinth and the Map
The actual test came ten minutes further, when I went out of the dorm and opened the app once again.
I tapped on my first class. And here it was: course name, date, lesson room... a name of a building which I was unable to pronounce. I saw a small icon of a map and had to press it.
The app also provided me with a campus map, placed calmly, telling me where the building was located to be not only in the main campus but to a specific corner of this massive arrangement of glass, steel, and enigmatizing doors. HSE is very beautiful and it is the main campus, though when you are a newbie, it will also seem like a level in a video game: you are to find the right staircase before the bell sounds.
Strolling on with the application, it was like a local student whispering in my ear: Turn left here. There is a point to this passage, yes. No, you don't have to panic yet."
I later found out that it was not only the main campus. As an App X user, you can access maps of other campuses as well and understand the position of the buildings within the city. It is like having a pocket sized 3D version of HSE. Moscow ceased to resemble the labyrinth without an end, and was beginning to resemble a maze that you could learn to navigate.
Secret Superpower: Free Room Location
During one of the most unexpectedly picturesque moments, it occurred between the classes.
My two-hour break, heavy knapsack, and the rather nil energy to occupy myself in a congested passageway were all that awaited me. The comfortable lounge places were occupied. The library was full. It was just as I was about to write a melodramatic monologue regarding the absence of place in this world, when one of my friends remarked:
So, why not look at free rooms in an application?
I stared at her. "You can... do that?"
Yes, you can.
App X includes a function that indicates the rooms that are currently free. The campus on a giant of potential study nests suddenly changed my fantasy: not only into a maze of closed doors, but into a maze of potential doors and possible study nests.
After opening the app, we filtered according to building and time and found a vacant classroom nearby. It was almost illegal, as though I had made a discovery of some kind. Our entrance triggered such facial responses in me, as we came into a hallway and saw desks arranged in rows, silent atmosphere, and a projector underway.
It was our thing to hunt using the app to find free rooms. They were used to practice presentations sometimes, to work as a group sometimes, and to silently charge our batteries, both our laptops and our social ones.
It no longer became the territory of the university, but it began to feel as though the university had got corners it could call its own.
Ratings, Realities and Grades
Naturally, adventures are not the only thing in App X. It is even rather brutish.
I was wasting time and writing an essay one evening and I had been curious enough to tap another tab. Numbers appeared. Lists. Percentages. And a phrase which gave me a churned-up stomach:
Rating
And that was it: my performance at school, being visualised. It is not only my grades, but also my place in the group and programme. I even contemplated shutting the app and the dramatic few seconds even thinking I has never seen it.
Being a foreign student, I came to HSE with a certain confidence: I am good in languages, I will do all right. That confidence was fondly seized by the rating tab, and patted on the head, and said, Let us see what the data will show, shall we?
It was good at times: after a good exam I took a little leap up. Other times it was a wake-up call: within a week of idleness you would lose a couple of positions. However with time it ceased to be frightening and it became an academic reflexion. It does not prettify matters but nor is it lying.
I was no longer living in a cloud of I think I am doing okay? but I was able to see how I was doing. Threatening it was, I suppose,--and oddly enough, thrilling, too.
Cafeteria Forecast: A daily menu
Next arose one of my favorite finds, the cafe menu.
You need to gauge how happy students are in any campus, then you need to visit the cafeteria line during lunch. In HSE, queues are very lengthy, and the worst thing is always finding yourself at the front of the queue only to realise that you did not even want anything to eat.
Fortunately, App X is the answer to that problem. It displays the menu of the weekly cafe: soups, main meals, side dishes, and in most cases with the day and time. We made it the order of the day to see what was in the menu:
11:45.
"Should we go now?"
Wait, wait very well, what shall we have to lunch... Aha. Pelmeni day. We run."
The menu can at times assist you in budgeting, at times it can assist you in making a psychological preparation (Today is a salad day. okay. I know my destiny.) and it can even be a one hundred and fifty: a guest of another culture talking about his or her comfort food as she gazes upon borscht.
It is like a minor characteristic. However, when you are not at home, the end of your morning classes and you are fatigued and hungry it can be a very strong encouragement to know that there is something hot who will greet you.
An Online Library Card
The capabilities of the app are not limited to schedules and meals.
The library was my source of knowledge about this App X that can serve as a digital library card. No panicking of forgetting plastic one in another jacket. I launched the app, displayed the screen and, just so, I was in. I later learnt that I could also see my borrowed books and due dates in the same place.
Then there is the gravity: papers, alerts, even health or management reports. To foreign students, the term document is a part of the horror genre. And still, when some things could be viewed via one of the apps that I regularly use in everyday life, it feels like it is a slightly less frightening thing.
It does not eradicate bureaucracy, just paraphernalia in a more understandable place: tap, read, screenshot, breathe.
The Kenneth Lay Search Bar That Saves Face
On the top of the app is an ugly little baseball player: the search bar.
The first time I used it was to verify our group code (which I constantly was confusing). At this point I realised I was able to search by teacher, other student groups and classrooms.
You have forgotten to spell the surname of your professor, where he has five consonants in a row?
Search.
Heavy head Does this mean you are reading a room code?
Search.
Alternatively, attempting to confirm that you did not get yourself into a wrong chat group.
Search again.
That search bar is invaluable to a person who is facing a new academic culture. It is the sort of thing that can provide the answers to questions you have been too embarrassed to ask oral, and it can also assist you to escape unimaginable catastrophes, such as addressing the number of your room, mistakenly, as the one you occupied last semester.
Notifications, Clarifying the Overload, and Art of Mastering the App
Now at some stage, however, app X was almost too much in my life.
I had switched on every notification in a frenzy: "I will become really organised! My phone kept answering with buzzing every second, new grades and schedules, menu changes, announcements, and announcements.
I realised that I was not a student working with an app anymore. I was now a collector of notification.
Thus I committed a rather minor electronic uprising. I entered the settings and very selectively selected what I really needed: schedule modifications, necessary academic notifications, perhaps, some grade announcements. The remainder would have to wait until I made my check-ins.
My routine now appears to be as follows:
Motivation Coffee Acquiring in the morning + App X = rapid search of the classes, rooms, and cafe fate.
evening tea + App X = check grades, tasks and which rooms may be free tomorrow and may be used by group work.
The app didn't change. I just changed how I used it. I ceased letting it scream in my face all day and returned it to the intended purpose of a useful tool, and not a cyber boss.
What the App Does Not Do (And Why That Is okay)
My essays have not been written by a single paragraph by App X. It has never solved a perplexed question of a professor and made sense of a complex theory. It has never been able to sit with me at the dorm kitchen on homesick nights, or eat with me when an exam is done successfully.
But it has:
Showed me the way over the different sections of the main campus.
Assisted in locating vacant rooms whenever I required privacy or greater room to work on groups.
Remineded me when I had to focus on my grades.
Told me on what days it was borscht day and when I had to carry my own snacks.
Brought so small morsels of evidence that I am part of the company: my name in the schedule, my books in the study room, my position in rating.
It is not a human friendship. Everything became quiet and constant in that dismal blue symbol in a year overloaded with newness: new country, new university, new languages. A computerized map that did not turn HSE into a maze but I could get used to touring it in a real sense.
A Note to Future (and My Previous) Students
Then I wonder about what my previous self must have been like I was at that point seated on the bunk bed, inundated with unread emails, attempting to figure out what building was what and how I was supposed to survive in this large academic city.
Had I the chance to do so, I would give her my phone, point to the blue icon, and tell her:
"Start here. It won't solve everything. But it will make to-day a good deal easier.
And that is what I would advise you as well, as long as you have only just arrived at HSE, and more so especially in a foreign country. Swipe down and get App X. Sign in. Swipe on the maps, the rooms, the menus. Allow it to demonstrate how this university with all its complication has been silently arranged to you on a small screen.
App X is not going to be the life of your student. But it will offer you something to rely on on your first bewildering weeks: a feeling of orientation.
And when you have a direction you can find your own very well.
Shared by
Tuba Masood
