For students, time at university is first and foremost about preparing for their future careers. However, many capable people have been able to succeed, make a discovery or an invention while still at their alma mater. Perhaps it is their example that makes us say today that the best way to train specialists is to involve students in real projects, either applied or scientific. In honour of Students' Day on 25 January, we will tell you about some of those who, while studying at university, were able to become creators of unique developments.

Inventors of "smart" sneakers Alexander Pinchuk and Maxim Levkin
 

Building an empire

IT is a young man's business. Ever since computers, programming and the Internet became of interest to big business, some students have managed to set up real business empires. The most famous example is, of course, Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook while still a Harvard student.

And the "Russian Zuckerberg", Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, launched the internet projects Durov.com and Spbgu.ru while studying at St. Petersburg University in the Faculty of Philosophy. The former is the university's electronic library of abstracts and a place to exchange ideas; the latter is the university's forum. It was after them that Durov set about prototyping the future social network.

Matt Mullenweg was in his first year at the University of Houston when he came up with WordPress, the website builder on which one in six websites on the Internet is built today.

Mark Zuckerberg was a programming prodigy before he went to Harvard, but Jack Dorsey was not bright: he tried twice to get a college degree, and failed both times. However, while studying at New York University, the boy came up with the idea to create Twitter, a service for exchanging short text messages.

Inventions and implementations

Of course, not every invention has the potential to become a business on this scale. But the newswires regularly carry stories about very interesting student inventions. Here are just a few examples of such inventions that have emerged in recent years.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Ben Herwetain and Seth Berg have created a small chip that is worn on the head on a headband and records information on possible concussions and dangerous bumps on a child or athlete's head.

And University of Wisconsin student Jonathan Geisler has invented an automatic cat feeder, but not a simple one that works with wet food. The feeder is designed to work for a week at the most - if the cat's owner is away for longer, the cat will have to go hungry. The invention is called the HealthPet Auto-Feeder.

But are such cases really only found in the West? There are many reports of Russian student inventions, too. For example, a group of sophomores at Tomsk Polytechnic University has developed the PillBand medical bracelet. It is useful for people who have to take medicine every day at a certain time. The pills are placed in the device's cells, the bracelet settings are used to set the time for taking them, and a reminder signal sounds at the right moment. Unlike foreign analogues, the development of Tomsk students not only makes it possible to follow the medication regimen, but also to wear the pills in the bracelet, and the PillBand does not need to be removed from the hand to take the medicine.

Danil Fonov, a first-year student of Applied Mechanics at Far Eastern Federal University, has created a bioprosthetic hand, the parts of which are printed on a 3D printer from biodegradable plastic, so the development is much cheaper than similar products.

Gleb Miroshnik, a student of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, is the author of the device that allows to "translate" texts from Braille into Russian. The invention is expected to be used for training people with vision loss, as well as for training staff at educational centres for blind and visually impaired people.

Inventors from Kashirka 31

And what about our native MEPhI?

The nuclear university has many examples when students were co-authors of research projects as part of a large team of scientists, for example, participated in the development of a new method of leukemia diagnostics. But let us recollect some cases when students became authors of their own developments.

2010. Dmitry Gornostayev, a 22-year-old student of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a nanomanipulator that could be used to create, store and study any nano-objects. The device was approved by experts at the Seliger Innovation Forum.

In 2017, third-year student Dmitry Sevastyanov invented a smartphone-based device that can identify hydrocarbon gases. The device allowed identifying and determining the concentration of such dangerous and flammable gases as methane, propane, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen.

In 2021 Atygay Ashirbekov, a master's student of IBIB, together with his scientific supervisor Leonid Dubov modernized the process of treatment of eye tumors. In his master's thesis the IBIB student proposed a progressive method of treatment of eye tumours, which was approved at the Svyatoslav Fyodorov Medical Centre. Svyatoslav Fyodorov Medical Centre.

And during the covid epidemic, our students did not waste time: MEPhI master's students developed a device which, with the help of LED radiation, promotes the recovery of patients with severe diseases, including coronavirus infection. The work was done under completely unscientific conditions: due to the pandemic, laboratories were closed and inquiring minds built their installation in the dormitory.

Some did not even wait until the moment when they could officially be called students. Students of Lyceum No. 1523, for example, have created "smart" trainers (external link) that show the way to your destination: using Bluetooth, the shoes synchronize with a special application on your smartphone and "get to know" the desired route. If you walk to the left, the left trainer vibrates; if you walk to the right, the right trainer vibrates.

These are just a glimpse of the big picture that shows that age is no barrier to creativity, and that a student can become a full-fledged participant in research, an inventor or the founder of a successful business.