I remember the way from school to home. In the evenings, when we would walk with my friends and parents, they would tell us interesting stuff, for example, about work or stargazing. And I have somehow always remembered this.

I spent a lot of time in my school, as in, I let's say went to school in the first student shift, and during the second shift I'd stay on for different extracurricular activities. And I liked it. I would stay back for the informatics group, and the chemistry group. As in my professional orientation had already formed at school.

How did your interest in chemistry come about?

That very after school chemistry group…there was this thing. They would tell me that it's difficult, and for some reason I wasn't accepted into it. At first I was like: nah, fine, I won't go. But then a few weeks later, I, probably wrote a really good assignment piece and creative work and they invited me in. That was most likely some sort of sense of purpose and like some kind of hidden interest. After that I would compete in competitions.

My parents are chemists as well. They graduated from KSTU, majoring in polymers, they met there in their third year. They were sent to Tomsk for work experience and then returned back too.

You seem to have this inherited history, that's awesome. Who or what influenced you during your time at school?

I immediately think of my first teacher. She instilled in me self-confidence, and after middle school, I chose to continue in a more specialized class. Back then the school formed mentally Tatar classes – they were classes where they taught ethnography, a Tatar language hour, generally it had in-depth Tatar language being taught, knowledgeable teachers in other subject, during tech classes we would do embroidery on namazlyks, sew beads onto kalfaks [national Tatar headdress for women – Ed.]. That was the difference from regular classes.

For me, my teen years were difficult. I had health problems: I had a constant high temperature. All in all, while we tried to figure it out, we'd travel to Kazan, and that meant that I missed some study time, almost half a year. And then, sometime during the 8th grade, I started to get better, and then it was more about getting ready for university.

Which university were you getting ready to apply to?

Because of the chemistry competitions, I was choosing between chemistry at KFU or KSTU. It turned out that the competitions were actively noted during application at KFU, and also there was a warmer welcome, and I thought, there were less people there. Right from the first year I participated in all the contests there, like, 'Miss Faculty'… Over there it's like this: the freshmen arrive, and it all begins – you wanna join the KVN guys [a type of comedy club team who go on to compete against other universities – Ed.], or you wanna join, like, some other student club.

Actually, it was a multi-university kind of club, that was also interesting to be involved with. We didn't just get together at KFU, we would also get together at Kazan State Power Engineering University, and at Kazan National Research Technical University, and KSTU. Overall it was created by the senior students, they took us with them – the first and second year students, and then they graduated and went to graduate school, and we kept it going.

We would do those report presentations about different, like carbon nanotubes, about all kinds of graphene sheets, atoms, different molecules, different methods, how to study them.

Then we also traveled to Moscow State University, they have the Faculty of Materials Science there. I always liked colloidal chemistry, I liked materials science.

Then I also stayed there for my Master's, and then after that there was an internship within the Master's program.

Let's talk in more detail about your internship.

Basically, first there was the opportunity to go to Turkey, to the university in Istanbul, but it was mostly postgraduates who went there. Later there was an opportunity to go to England and work there. That was my first internship like that in a laboratory.

What were your initial feelings when you arrived in England?

When I flew into the airport, it was nighttime, I drove down to Brighton with a colleague, she got off at her stop (we rode on this red double decker bus) and she goes "That's it, keep going until you reach the so-and-so stop, and write to me once you've arrived and checked in".

I was alone on the bus, at night. And then, I think, they either closed off the street, or didn't announce my stop, and subsequently I ended up at the final stop. And at that point I start explaining to the driver that I need to get to the so-and-so stop with this particular address – and he turned the entire bus around and took me to my stop.

Wow.

Yeah.

They have a cold and damp climate, such beautiful parks, such beautiful lawns, greenery, that freedom, there's the La Manche channel… People there celebrate every Friday, like how we do New Year's, from what I saw, as in they have this absolute freedom in all that. They let themselves go, let's say.

The English speak very fast, I understood very little, that's why it was easiest for me to speak to the guys from Germany. There were guys from many countries, also a family from India.

I think that these internships – they change your thinking. Trips in general, probably, change you. In any case travel – it always contains something special, don't they say that you can live a year in one interesting day.

Here I saw on what levels some issues are solved. Very quickly. For example, technically there weren't many documents I needed to get together, as in I arrived, they immediately gave me a key card, like after a few minutes of getting to know me. There was some stipend being paid out – all that too was done without some sort of specific, long document processes. And you start work at the laboratory almost the day you arrive.

What were the work goals at the internship, what did you do?

My work was based on materials, like polymers – they're gels that change their structure at a certain temperature. It was supposed that it would be like this smart gel: a dressing for medical purposes, for example, which would change its structure at a temperature of 36.6, and release some kind of substance. They gave me the equipment to study the mechanical properties of these polymeric materials, but we also would visit some complex, electronic microscopes with my supervisor.

Overall we have equipment like that here too, but you can't as easily access them, there will be a specific person assigned to look after them, because they're expensive.

What other differences were there?

The culture of communication. For example, when you board the bus, you had to always greet the driver, and when you get off, always say 'Thank you, goodbye'.

In England I lived in a house where a big family lived, we cooked dinner together, it was fun. Or the host mother would make dinner and ring a bell so that everyone who were at home would come to dinner. It was easy and interesting. The host parents were the same age as my parents, and they asked me to connect them together on Skype, so they could say hi. And they'd also say "I want to like know, did your parents know this hockey team or not".

You never felt lonely there.

We would travel to London almost every weekend. In the town where I lived, there weren't many Russian language speakers, but when we'd go to London, you'd come across them. Over there people allow themselves to not dress for the weather, sometimes it's just a more free style, like, self-expression.

You can even feel it straight away on the plane: like when you're flying London-Moscow, everything is so unhinged, fun. Then I got on the plane traveling Moscow-Kazan, and there it's people who are coming back from professional development or something – they're all wearing suits, dresses, like a classic style.

I remembered the museums really well. Science Museum, Energy Museum, basically, different central museums. We sat at this table which was inscribed with: this is the exact spot where the structure of DNA was discovered.


And when I had seen all that there, later in Russia, I would visit interesting science places, like those sorts of different sites, installations.

Did your perception of Kazan change after life in England?

They have architecture, they have different buildings, they're all different, but here, I came to the Universiade Student Village, to my flat, it was 2012 back then just before the Universiade and I say: "All our buildings are identical, why are they all identical?"

The second time I went to intern in England was in autumn, and the trip was different this time, more calm, there wasn't a group of us this time, it was mostly people writing their PhDs. I spent more time talking to friends over Skype.

Then upon my return I moved to Moscow. Also because my personal life came together that way. And a year later I started working at MSU.

And that's when I like got to know this guy, who was from RUDN and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, as in there's this entire team of young scientists, each representing their specialty.

Well, and, it turned out that this impulse played a part, that I needed to do something for Russia in order for, for example, so we would also have a developed scientific community. We then started doing projects, travel around Russian cities, like Yekaterinburg, Petrozavodsk, then around the Moscow Oblast. I got involved with the Union of Young Scientists.

At that time I also traveled to Sweden for an interview for graduate school. I was only there for 2 days, and I remember that there are really a lot of bicycles and places where you can just sit and read a magazine, places of rest like that, very comfortable with a nice atmosphere.

What did you do in Moscow?

I was engaged in projects by school children – it's a competition among the best projects, the Youth Innovative Creativity Centre, where kids can kind of realize themselves in project activities.

Then I actually transferred to the Youth Innovative Creativity and Nanotechnologies Centre. I specialized there too, in atomic force microscopy – it's this special method, accordingly, on 3D printers.

School kids would come to me and I'd teach them how to work with these printers. One of our students made a 3D printer on the 3D printer all by himself.

That's straight up some kind of fractal art. So before 3D printers you mentioned something about something atomic?

Microscopes, well, a scanning probe, they're called atomic-forces, they were manufactured in the workshop where I worked. So like they make various kinds of spare parts. In general, it seems that over there, using the centre as a foundation, they begin with simple things, and then students connect up to it with all sorts of serious projects. Accordingly, I simply specialized in this laboratory for almost a year, in order to be, like, able to use this method, that is, at Kazan University I studied the method of dynamic light scattering, but here it's scanning microscopy, and there are a lot of methods, so like, you can specialize in one or two research methods.

What places in Moscow could you say were 'yours'?

I like the Botanical Gardens, especially when the lilacs blossom, peonies, there's a few hundred different types and you could even like volunteer there. For me for example, I felt like I missed, like, gardening, so I just would volunteer at the Gardens. You could help there to stake and tie up trees, and do some other things – that replaced my time gardening here.

But otherwise, the parks I liked, and also my favourite place VDNKh, well, because they have all that space stuff, all that stuff, Roscosmos museum and like that entire theme. The Science Festival started with the fact that I participated in event management, that all had a lot to do with space too, cosmonaut Leonov came there, so that for me was the most interesting meeting, then cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky, Nobel Prize winners.

How did your decision to return back to Mendeleevsk come about?

Well, I sorta went back home quite often, in any case I kept in touch. It was important for me that I get to know the methods, equipment, I wanted to apply my knowledge here. Again that's like this impulse to speak at the IT-Park in Kazan. But then again it's like this kind of subject..that kind of equipment – it's very rarely used anywhere.

For some time I actually thought that I could combine the two: work at MSU, live in Moscow, be involved with something in Kazan kind of. As in it all somehow harmoniously worked together and I stayed on top of it. Then I came to the compatriot expats Forum, for the fourth time, probably. The people there would talk about which countries and cities they're working in, some would say that they returned to Kazan and started something here. And it got me thinking: what would really be significant for me, what am I interested in, what's important, to actually do something like that, for myself?

And it just so happened that the family needed some help here and there, and at the same time I'm thinking like: OK, I need to get my professional orientation together so that I could like do something specific, in my area of specialization.

I tried to sorta start a startup with these microscopes using the IT-Park as a base, and that's when I realized that startups don't always work. I wanted to make a startup that would actually produce something. I had students and overall the work is with developers there, and we modernized the software for those microscopes. I tried to build this team, a few times my students would leave and need to be replaced.

During the process I understood that having your own project is so difficult: getting a team together, thinking where to get the investments from, how to build it all correctly. And I realized that I needed so many resources, I need this, I need that.

And well, like quietly after the last forum I came to the idea to work at an industrial enterprise in Mendeleevsk, I thought: that would be significant, and fine.

How did you apply for the factory? What did you day?

It went a little something like this: I came and said that I want to be involved in innovative trends. Because here we have a leading economic territory.

And I thought that the world is as such right now, that projects too are done at a distance kind of, and in this year, everything has gone online anyway, and I realized that all my decisions were the right ones, that in any case to always be connected.

Then after a year of work, I started working with students, the youth of the factory.

Mendeleevsk – what kind of city is it? Describe it to a person who has never been there.

Mendeleevsk is a mono-city, it has city-forming enterprises here – these are our chemical plants - Ammoni, Karpov Chemical Plant. The town is small, everything is close together, as in, here it will take you 15 minutes to drive by car from one end of the city to the other. I began to drive here. There is the opportunity to be among nature, for me it is important. We have Wildberries here.

The funny thing is that here you can't, let's suppose, do what they do in the big cities – walk past someone or just say hi.

Like you can't find that anywhere else. It's not like people in Moscow know each other since childhood, right?

For example, let's say one of the senior citizens got a new phone and they ask you "Can you please help me get Whatsapp". And somewhere else you kinda would have said no because you have a lot of work on, but in our town you can't do that, you have to help that person and that person will help you later down the track.

What do you think is missing in Mendeleevsk?

The pool isn't open in the summer, swimming is important for me. We probably don't have many brands. For example, my colleagues from Moscow will ask, and they won't know anything here. For example, a person might say "I want to like order something to get delivered to you, but I'm this Moscow introvert, so like how can I order online?". Basically you can't: you can't order stuff through a website, you have to call them by phone.

How many people live there?

Around 30 thousand.

We have trains, every day you can leave for Moscow. As in I always knew that if I wanted to, I could go. I stay in good shape travel-wise: I traveled to some events, it was interesting, away from the Republic.

And then, it just so happened that I got involved with these communities, networks, where there's like all this networking, it's very active – and that's enough for me.

Then the Engineering Hackathon project was born – as a way of career guidance for school kids in factories.

How exactly did it come about?

We did them here together with the University of Talents, in Mendeleevsk. I would come up with problems for the competitions. And I then received a grant from Rosmolodezh for this social project.

You also engage in beekeeping, don't you? Tell us about it.

Yeah, my parents have been doing it for 25 years already. And my uncles are beekeepers, in his time, my grandad did it too. When dad finds some lifehacks, like his new innovative ways of doing things, he gets published in the 'Pchelovodstvo' magazine – about 10 of his articles have already been published.

It's always nice that people find out about it, they get in touch – it's kinda so easy, when there's something that's ready, earned, when you have your own brand, your own products. We send honey to other cities in Russia too. Startups aren't like that.

We witnessed this since we were kids, that technological process, when they bring the bees out after winter, when the first flowers bloom, then the process of swarming, then the harvesting of the honey – every summer. When you're growing up, you understand the significance of this.

Beekeeping for me right now – is also a big job, everything needs to be so precise here, when you examine the bees, when you pump the honey, for me that's all the equivalent of those modern research methods. The technologies are also developing, before we used to do a lot of it by hand.

Bees have their own personality, mood – it depends on the weather, and how correctly everything is organized. There's really a lot of nuances. It's interesting and time consuming. Now even when I go to Moscow, everyone asks for honey, and that's kinda like my trademark, and I'm very grateful that I have that.

Right now I want to not only use the experience of our mentors, parents, adults – the desire to transfer my own knowledge to school kids and students crops up.

I actually slowly came to the realization that I'm like looking for something in Moscow, for example, but it's not there. Like those same dear paths that we'd walk down from school to home – you can search the entire world, like everywhere, go around all the schools of Moscow, but your school won't be there, it's only right here and that's kind of it.