For several years, the Olympiad office of MEPhI together with the Pre-university have been organizing physics and mathematics schools for gifted schoolchildren. There are several purposes to hold these schools: preparation of our schoolchildren for  the participation in Olympiads of the high level, attraction of gifted schoolchildren from Moscow and regions to MEPhI’s system, advertisement of MEPhI and its positioning as a centre of physical and mathematical schoolchildren training in general and for contest preparation in particular.

Over the last few years these schools were held in MEPhI and in the Pre-university, the camp "Volga", in Podolsk, in the Sverdlovsk region, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Over three years schools were attended by about 1000 schoolchildren. It is important to emphasize that the classes are free for participants.

Famous figures of Olympiad movement in the country as well as MEPhI lecturers participate as lecturers at the school, who give lecturers for children from all over Russia – winners of different competitions.

This tradition hasn’t been broken this year. Over the past two weeks there were two physical and mathematical schools.

The Pre-university of MEPhI hosted a special school for pupils of the Pre-university, who qualified for the regional round of the Russian Olympiad in physics. The school took place on January 5-6 at the University Lyceum № 1511. It was attended by 23 students.

Several experimental works in the form of experimental tasks of the Russian Olympiad in physics (but requiring less time to complete) were prepared for participants, who completed 2-3 of them. After that works were reviewed and analyzed which allowed participants better understand their mistakes, and feel the principles of works.

According to the participants of the school, the classes proved to be extremely rich and useful. We hope it will allow schoolchildren of the Pre-university to overcome the regional round and pass in the final round of the Russian Olympiad in physics.

The second school – The III Ural school of mathematics and physics of MEPhI – was held on January 11-14 on the basis of the Technological Institute – branch of MEPhI in the city of Lesnoy.

It was attended by about one hundred students of 9-11 grades from the Lesnoy, Nizhnyaya Tura, Nizhny Tagil, Kachkanar, Serov, Krasnouralsk, and other cities of the North of Sverdlovsk region. Almost all schoolchildren participated in the MEPhI Olympiads. Some of them were winners and prize-winners of these contests.

The importance of organizing such a school in Lesnoy is determined by career-guidance and educational reasons, the need to increase Unified State Exam’s scores of the potential MEPhI students, and general brand awareness of the University in the region. In addition, an important aim of the school was to intensify the educational system in Lesnoy, because a very small number of students of this city has become winners and prize-winners of Olympiads.

The school program was designed to help future applicants to pass the exam in physics, to interest in a physics and stimulate them to participate in the Olympiads of MEPhI, to sort out tasks, to give recipes for solving such problems. The main reason of the school is demonstration that mathematics and physics can provide the basis for their future profession: on the one hand, interesting and promising, and on the other hand, profitable and stable.

We wish success to all participants of physical and mathematical schools of MEPhI – in passing the Unified State Exam, in admissioning to the leading universities of the country, and in life in general. And MEPhI will continue the important and interesting work on the organization of such schools.