School selection takes place in three stages:

1. Online testing: After completing the application form, you will receive an email with a link. Five hours are allotted for solving the tasks of the test.
2. A written exam: for applicants to the Moscow branch of the ShAD, the exam will take place in person in Moscow at the end of May or at the beginning of June.
   Applicants to the branches and the correspondence department will take the exam online at the beginning of June. Only those who have successfully passed the online testing stage can participate in the written exam.
3. Interview: at the end of June - beginning of July, for all those who successfully passed the first two stages, interviews will be held at the ShAD offices or via Skype.

Training

Upon admission to the ShAD, knowledge is tested within the framework of the general program, which includes the basic sections of higher algebra, mathematical analysis, combinatorics, probability theory, as well as the basics of programming. Examples of written exam tasks:

• 2012 set
• 2013 set
• 2014 set
• 2016 set
• 2017 set

Paid training

Applicants who showed themselves well at the interview, but did not pass the general competition, will be able to start studying on a paid basis (only in the Moscow branch). Paid studies are no different from free ones - you need to complete all the same difficult tasks, meeting tight deadlines. Tuition costs 110,000 rubles per semester. If a student completes the semester with "good" and "excellent", the tuition fee for him is reduced to 55,000 per semester. Those who passed with "good" and "excellent" two sessions in a row continue to study for free.

Hello! We are glad to congratulate you on your admission to the School of Data Analysis! Closer to September, the curator of your branch will write about organizational issues.

So, I'm in school. And, almost sure, the oldest student there. There will be no problems with couples, you can even go to the skating rink (except that the rides with the instructor may have to be postponed for the weekend). Now how did I do it.

An acquaintance offered to try his luck: "you can." The online selection was hell and darkness, I suffered for four hours. Although, to be honest, I cheated a little: in programming assignments, I simply translated programs from pseudocode to C ++, and even one task on matrices, without picking up a key, I simply solved it in the forehead with exel. I didn’t know what a “positive inertia index” was (did I spell that name correctly?) - I had to look it up, it turned out to be just the number of positive elements in the diagonal expansion of a quadratic form.

Well, the second stage is the face-to-face exam. I bought a reading room, overlaid with notes and began to prepare. Most of all I was afraid of terrible integrals: any first-timer will outdo me in this. Well, to the point. This is what the Yandexoids offered us at the exam (the conditions of the tasks are reduced).

1. How many ways are there to get from (0,0,0) to ( n, 2n, 3n) if it is possible to take +1 steps along any of the axes?
2. Find the 319th derivative at the zero of the function (x²+17) / (x 4 −5x²+4)
3. How many permutations commute with (123)(456)?
4. In an equilateral triangle ABC area 1 choose a point M. Find the expectation of the area ABM.
5. ∫ 1 / √1+e x dx
6. Show that an integer matrix does not have rational (non-integer) eigenvalues.
7. There are cans of gasoline on the circular road. There is a car with a known fuel consumption and an empty tank of unlimited capacity. For O( n) operations to find out from which canister you need to start, so that, collecting fuel, drive all the way and not stop empty (or say that this is impossible).

I solved 6 problems - except, of course, the integral. True, I was worried, and I decided 2 and 3 incorrectly (with the right technique!)

At the interview, they asked more about the personal: why did you decide to go to the School, is it not difficult for you to work, nothing that everyone is younger than you? The answer was delayed for four days (in the early days I periodically shook mail via the web when my partner turned away). And finally they answered.

Positive admission experience. I remember myself as a fighter. I finally bought a reader (and I do not part with the device, the purchase is on point).

Negative experience. I should have calmed down, then tasks 2 and 3 would have come out. It was not worth solving the integral at all - or in preparation to devote more time to integrals. Finally, the preparation in the form in which it was, gave little. I tightened up the theorems, remembered how this or that thing is justified, but of this goodness, only a record of the permutations was required.

Education

In 2017, enter the ShAD (School of Data Analysis) Yandex.

Hello!

My name is Vladimir, I am 26 years old. I have several higher educations (metallurgy engineer and economics and enterprise management). I received both educations at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. At the moment I work as a Project Manager in one of the domestic IT companies, which is a vendor of production management information systems. At work, I constantly encounter the need to aggregate and transfer data, integrate various systems using the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). I heard about ShAD a year ago, but the previous year was very busy - the delivery of theses at the second higher and master's programs, admission to graduate school. In addition, there were a lot of protracted, working business trips. At the moment, it’s not so busy, so I think I’ll finally deal with the issue of preparation and admission. For the current date, I feel a little more than completely unprepared;) All institute matan is forgotten. In combinatorics and ter.ver I studied the material on my own. In programming, I learned Python on my own (with the help of courses on the courser and stepik). I think that the training will be distributed in terms of complexity and load as follows: Matan - 50%, Combinatorics and Ter.Ver. - 30%, Programming - 20%.

Why did you decide to use this service? Everything is simple. I think it will help me keep track of the dynamics and maybe find people who can help me, or who I can help :)

Termination Criteria

Enrollment in SAD. Not necessarily for a full-time department, but preferably for a budget place.

Personal Resources

The resources for this task are Time and Information. Time is tight, tk. work, business trips and student training.

You may need money to pay for courses or a tutor. There are no special problems with money.

Green Goal

I want to enter the ShAD to get unique knowledge that will help me in the future. This knowledge is given by absolutely unique people, acquaintance with whom, I am sure, will be absolutely not superfluous in my life. In addition, this is a good challenge to prove independence, self-organization and the ability to achieve your goals.

Yandex opens a new enrollment to the School of Data Analysis. These are free two-year evening courses for those who want to get an education in the field of data processing and analysis and extracting information from the Internet. The school requires good mathematical preparation and is designed primarily for students and young graduates of engineering and mathematical specialties.

How to proceed

You need to fill out a form on the school website until May 15. After that, you will receive an email with a link to an online test in mathematics and basic programming. All those who successfully complete the test will be invited by the school to a written exam, which will take place in late May - early June. The best results of the exam will have to go through an interview, following which a final decision will be made.

Training program

On the school website, you can study the exam tasks of past years and find out what you should prepare for. You can get acquainted with the teachers of the school and learn about the new direction "Big Data" at the Open Day of the ShAD. It will take place April 19 in the Moscow office of Yandex, to participate you need to register.

School classes are held on weekday evenings. You can study at school in person or in absentia, according to video lectures. During training or after graduation, students can take an internship at Yandex.

The School of Data Analysis has existed since 2007 and has graduated more than 300 specialists, many of whom are engaged in science, work for Yandex and other large IT companies in Russia and abroad. Branches of the ShAD exist in St. Petersburg (within the Computer Science Center), Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Minsk and Kyiv.

Recently, the Ukrainian IT community has often discussed the problems of degrading education in Ukraine and Russia: universities are no longer graduating cyborg programmers who calculate any project in a day and diligently begin to implement it, but at best self-taught coders who are in the back rows of the audience instead of listening to lectures about vintage tube receivers, they read books on programming languages. Yes, these people can be congratulated - they themselves are trying to somehow learn in order to find a job in the future, but often the lack of methodology and a clearly defined learning process does not allow self-taught people to compete with programmers of the “old school”. I am one of those individuals as well.

I mainly used the university bench to study various programming languages, learned a lot, gained experience working as a programmer for hire and on my projects, but I feel that there is still one mess in my head that urgently needs to be brought into some kind of structured form. As a result, I began to systematize the acquired knowledge, look for options for solving the problem even faster and more efficiently, write down and highlight the class of tools that would help me with this. But even that did not suit me. It was felt that it was necessary to be in the company of people who were head and shoulders above me in knowledge, to learn from their experience. So I came across an ad for admission to the School of Data Analysis from Yandex in Ukraine.

Why did I want to go to the School of Data Analysis so much? Because now, like air, I need the practice of solving complex problems, which requires not only knowledge of a programming language, but a good knowledge base in mathematics and probability theory. I believe that by learning how to solve such problems, I will be more competitive in the market - and this is my basic task, the driving force behind my desire to learn new things. I believe that the people who created such a highly scientific project have a lot to learn and it is worth fighting for the opportunity to learn.

Training

To apply for admission, it was necessary to fill out a detailed questionnaire and solve several mathematical problems. analysis, probability theory, analytical geometry. The tasks were very easy, but since in filling out the questionnaire it was necessary to indicate only the answers, and not the solution, for safety I decided to double-check everything a couple of times in order to pass this stage for sure. I spent a couple of evening hours on this after work and sent it.

A week later, I received a letter from the admission committee of the school stating that I had passed the first stage and was invited for an interview at the Kiev office of Yandex. I was advised to familiarize myself with the main topics on which the interviews would take place. A pleasant moment was that the questions were also accompanied by books on which one could prepare (I passed the mathematical analysis at the institute four years ago and, of course, I forgot the names of the books).

I decided to spend two weeks preparing for the interview, and every day after work I remembered what I had forgotten and learned what I didn’t know before. In particular, I had to learn linear algebra from scratch, since they didn’t teach it at my department of electronics. I want to say that if you have already graduated from the university and your work is not related to mathematics, then you need to allocate more than two weeks for preparation. It is highly desirable that you have a vacation during this time, as you need to spend a lot of effort and time. The emphasis should not be on theory, but on solving practical problems, which is difficult to achieve after a working day. However, the theory also needs to be known “from cover to cover”, since the tasks at the interview were often non-standard.

Time "H"

So the day of the interview arrived. In the morning I arrived at the Yandex office, met the examiners (they were a nice young guy and a girl from Moscow State University), and the interview began. It consisted of practical tasks. After solving the first one, they give you the second, then the third, and so on until the examiner understands that you have passed, or you understand that you have failed. The first task was on the topic of programming.

My first task was to write a program for finding GCD in any programming language. Since at school I went to olympiads in computer science and mathematics, I quickly solved it (from memory) and moved on to the next one. The second task is to find the derivative of x to the x power. Quite an easy task if you know the properties of the logarithm, but I forgot this very property. Fortunately, the examiner directed me in this direction, and the problem was quickly solved. I want to emphasize that at the interview, unlike the questionnaire, it was no longer the answers that were checked, but the train of thought that led to the answer. Such a system of admission was used in the same KPI before the introduction of unified testing and gave quite good results. It can be seen that the school was organized not for Yandex PR, but so that promising young people can make a qualitative leap in development.

I can’t remember the next tasks exactly, I can only remember the topics: calculate the determinant of a matrix of size n, where n is any number; check if the vector space is a basis; calculate the variance of the distribution function for a given probability density function. On average, the interview took two hours - someone gave up earlier, someone sat until the last.

"Try it again"

The examination committee sent out the results by mail, regardless of whether the person passed or not. They sent me a notification that I didn't pass.

Surprisingly, after I was not accepted, the desire to study at the ShAD did not disappear, but only intensified. This year I also want to try to go to school, but I try to prepare in advance. To begin with, it is necessary to recall the whole theory once again, and after that - to disassemble and disassemble the tasks, since it is they that are primarily important for admission.

With this article, I want to officially start my campaign to prepare for joining the Yandex School. I plan to share my thoughts and developments in this direction with DOU readers: I think that I am not the only one preparing to enter this year.