Olexandra Tverezovska, a graduate student in the specialty “Finance and Audit of Entrepreneurship”, Department of Finance and Entrepreneurship, won a grant to receive the Latvian state scholarship for one semester of the 2020-2021 aca-demic year at one of the largest universities in Latvia – University of Latvia (Riga, Latvia).
We asked Olexandra about the process of preparing the documents, asking what was difficult and, on the contrary, easy.
1) Was it difficult to prepare an application for the program?
Honestly, I already had sufficient experience in applying for international aca-demic mobility programs at the time of the announcement of this program. Therefore, I already had almost the majority of the necessary documents. It only remained to prepare documents specific for each program. In my case, it was an invitation letter, which the one must independently receive from a university. Therefore, preparing documents is not difficult at all, as it might seem at the first glance. Within the framework of each program, a number of instructions are pro-vided for the formation of a package of documents. Above all, I had a coordina-tor — the deputy head of the Department of Finance and Entrepreneurship in in-ternational affairs Yu.G. Gumenna — who has experience in participating in in-ternational exchange programs herself and who helped me a lot with advice and recommendations.
2) How long did the preparation of the documents take and what was the most difficult?
The most difficult thing was to decide on a university in Latvia, which one I want to go to study and get a positive result in the form of an invitation letter from the university. I chose several possible options at once, found the contact person of this university and corresponded. It should be borne in mind that it is corre-spondence that is the longest process, because not all contact persons immediate-ly respond to letters. Weekends and holidays also delay the process of receiving letters. In addition, the application fell on the period of quarantine already an-nounced, both here and in Latvia. Therefore, even the receipt of documents at our university was in electronic form.
3) What turned out to be unexpectedly simple?
I can hardly remember what was unexpectedly simple. It was unexpectedly pleasant at the first stages to receive several letters of invitation from various universities in Latvia at once. And here the choice was up to me. Therefore, ef-forts had to be made even in the simplest moments.
4) Have you previously participated in such mobility programs?
Yes, I have repeatedly applied for various mobility programs. Not every applica-tion immediately becomes successful, but the main thing is to gain experience, and a desire will necessarily lead to success.
5) What are the expectations from travel and education in Latvia?
The expectations are only pleasant. As well as from a meeting with a country al-ready known to me, pretty mesmerized me at first sight, and from the new expe-rience of training and gaining new knowledge in the best university of Latvia.