OREANDA-NEWS. November 2, 2007. MIRAX GROUP Corporation once again welcomed on its premises a group of students and teachers from the Moscow State Construction University (MGSU). Fifty students in their fifth year of studying were led by Mr. Boris Shirshikov, deputy dean of the former Department of Civil and Industrial Construction (now Institute of Construction and Architecture). The guests were granted an opportunity to visit one of the most interesting sites currently under construction in Russia.

The tour, titled "Construction organization and management with specific reference to the Federation Tower", has been initiated by the Department of Personnel Reserve Training of the MIRAX GROUP Corporation. Artur Alexandrov, deputy member of the company's Board of Directors, told the students about the immensity of the scale of the construction underway, the innovative technologies and materials utilized in its course, as well as about the unique nature of the super tower itself. The tour climaxed in the group of visitors being taken to the 57th floor of the skyscraper.

Animated faces of the guests as well as a long chain of their questions that the corporate representative hosting the tour had to answer spoke volumes about the impression this hands-on experience produced on the visitors. For example, these engineers and architects to-be were extremely curious to know how well this tall building could withstand considerable wind loads. How do the high-speed elevators within the building operate? How are the building's utility services arranged? It should be noted that scores of higher education institutions are interested in this sort of collaboration with one of the country’s leading construction companies. The matter is that institutes and universities often have difficulty catching up with state-of-the-art construction realities. Before any new technology can be officially included into the university curriculum and become part of lecture material, teachers have to become familiar with it first, after which information about the said technology has to be transformed into specifically developed students’ guides. In the course of this time period, for those dealing with new construction practices in reality the said groundbreaking technology already becomes an achievement of the past.

Partly such out-of-class seminar sessions can be considered as one of the solutions for said problem. They help young professionals to keep pace with state-of-the-art technologies. By the way, based on the previous tours to the sites under construction by MIRAX GROUP, a few MGSU students wrote and successfully defended their respective graduation research papers. Besides, experience proves that many of those who today only watch with rapture their older colleagues at work, subsequently seek to do their professional internships at the company construction sites and later try to become employed with the company on a permanent basis. It is no coincidence that tours of this kind are initiated by the corporate Department of Personnel Reserve Training.