I am Makhmud Makhmudov, a proud Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences alumni. I graduated this year with a Masters in Strategic Enterprise Management. It makes me happy to admit that I am extremely satisfied with my choice of university and study program. The knowledge I have gained at the university is priceless. In addition, I met some wonderful people during the time spent at the university, which only helped me form a new level of thinking.
Given that my previous experience has been in the financial sector, I wanted to gain knowledge that would allow me to start a business in the same industry and manage financial projects well. Estonia attracted me as a country right from the beginning as it offers opportunities to create your own business.
When I started my research, I looked at institutions that offered study programs in English and Russian. I read through the content of the proposed curriculum. In addition, I paid attention to lecturers’ personalities and professional achievements. The theory that is taught in an educational institution should always be good, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. A lecturer must know what he talks about, and that comes when a person himself works every day, so it was critical for me that the lecturers themselves were engaged in business. I considered EUAS as some good friends of mine highly recommended it, and today I can say with absolute certainty that this decision has been the absolute best. Almost all university professors are either directly involved in entrepreneurship themselves or have experience in significant positions, which allows them to look at different aspects of a business. I knew that my choice of study program would be related to the financial component. However, the speciality Strategic Enterprise Management was ideally suited to my personal request.
Among the subjects, I want to mention Financial Management, Enterprise Finance, Environmental Analysis and Risk Management, Organisational Law Principles, Business Process Analysis and Management, Legal Space of the Economic Environment, Financial Analysis, and Business Finance. Each one of them was equally interesting. Also, I cannot fail to mention such a subject as Research Methods, which is very helpful for those who write scientific articles and other works. I want to thank all the lecturers and staff of the university, the head of the speciality Ekaterina Mint, and the supervisors of my Master’s thesis Suzanna and Nikolai Kalinin.
The learning process is strongly tied to the practical component. Actual and up-to-date data is used, which are essential for training and the object in question. As a result, a student receives a complete set of knowledge (theory and practice) concerning the current situation in the country and the world. In fact, after each lecture, we can apply new knowledge in practice. One of the most important things to note is the lecturers’ availability for contact. Here, a lecturer is not just an employee of an educational institution but also a person with whom one can consult and converse in real conditions, and even receive important advice. Something else that is worth mentioning is the variety of teaching materials and their availability. Books, articles, legislation, information materials – everything is available to the student in the libraries, backed by internet access, equipping the students with a place where the right ideas can be generated for academic work and new ideas created for new business.
My family has been my primary motivator, not just for moving to Estonia and adapting here, but for my development in general. My family and I have been living in Europe for a long time, and the process of adaptation and integration was extremely easy for us. The only thing that we were particularly wary about was the weather. In Estonia, the sun hardly shines in the winters. In addition, due to Covid-19 restrictions, we could not travel typically, and therefore it seemed unlikely to step out anywhere. Despite that, I can talk about Estonian beauty for hours. I love Estonian nature. Nature is essential to me. Clean and well-groomed parks, forest areas, and seaside promenades are what energises me. White nights in summer are like poetry.
I like the organisation of public transport even between short distances – you don’t need to spend a lot of time on the road, you can have several meetings daily. For business, this factor, at times, is decisive. Of course, I cannot fail to note the Estonian electronic system, an environment where every inhabitant interacts with the state without needing personal presence. You get used to it so much that you don’t understand how you can exist without it. I am happy that other countries are now also implementing similar systems; it is convenient for people and saves time and effort. I also like the Estonians’ attitude towards sports, culture, and music.
My advice to future applicants and students is straightforward and simple: “Study”! We are all grown-ups; each of us has something or other to occupy our time, and it may be easy to get distracted. But the Master’s program is short enough, only two years, which means that if we relax at any point, we could miss an entire study program chain or lose interest. This would neither be in the interest of the student nor the lecturer. Therefore, addressing future students, I want to tell them that the study is exciting and the program is prepared so that it is interesting to listen to and perceive. You only need to gather all the will into a fist and study.
Learn here and now! Create value in the present, not in the supposed future. As Albert Einstein said: “I never think about the future. It’s coming too fast.” The knowledge that you will receive will be the biggest reward for your work, and you will understand this only at the end of the training. In the future, I plan to develop my project and expand it first to European participants and then to the world community. It requires a lot of effort and knowledge. I got the knowledge at EUAS. Now I need to gather my strength, and I am sure everything will work out.