Two Weeks at Samara University: High Technology Management from Jakarta

An International Programme From Jakarta

In January 2021, I spent two weeks attending a winter programme at Samara National Research University in Russia, without actually leaving Jakarta.

The programme took place during the pandemic, so the entire experience happened online. Classes usually started around 6 PM Jakarta time and continued into the evening, covering a mix of lectures, workshops, group discussions, assignments, presentations, and cultural activities. Even the city tour was adapted into an online format, with the university team driving around Samara while participants followed the tour remotely.
It was an unusual format for an international programme, but the distance became surprisingly easy to forget once the sessions started. For two weeks, my evenings revolved around classes, Miro boards, discussions with students from different countries, group assignments, and the occasional Russian cultural session.

The programme itself was called Winter Program on High Technology Management, running from 11 to 25 January 2021. Samara University structured it around the management side of technology and innovation, combining business, project management, product development, communication, and entrepreneurship into one compact programme.

Learning How Technology Projects Actually Move

The curriculum covered a fairly broad range of subjects. We worked through customer development, project management, agility, intellectual property, marketing, negotiation, risk management, business models, presentation skills, and several related topics throughout the programme.

What made the programme useful for me was the way those subjects were connected through exercises.

During the design thinking lab, for example, we worked through empathy mapping and stakeholder mapping using Miro. It was my first formal exposure to the design thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Instead of treating the framework as a diagram to memorize, the session asked us to actually work through it collaboratively.

Other sessions approached the same process from different directions. Customer Development focused on understanding traction and whether an idea actually addressed something people needed. Market Analysis brought the discussion toward market size, buyers, competitors, and trends. Business Models looked at how an idea could operate as an organization, while Risk Management introduced the practical uncertainties that come with executing it.
Seen together, the programme gave me an early picture of how an idea moves from a discussion into something that can actually be managed.

The Ideas That Stayed With Me

One of the sessions I remember most clearly was the introduction to Agile and Scrum.

At the time, these were still relatively new concepts to me. We discussed the differences between development methodologies, explored the principles behind Agile, and then practiced Scrum through a collaborative exercise. The emphasis throughout the session was on working in smaller cycles, getting something tangible onto the table, evaluating the result, and improving it through the next iteration.

When I wrote the original programme report, several ideas kept appearing in my notes: iteration, MVPs, planning manageable pieces of work, evaluating completed work with the team, and repeating the process. I also noted how breaking a project into smaller cycles could make problems easier to identify and reduce the impact of individual failures.

Looking back, that vocabulary feels very familiar now.

Many of the projects I worked on afterwards would involve some version of the same process: understand the requirement, make the problem manageable, build something concrete, review what happened, and adjust the next step.

At Samara, I was encountering those ideas inside a classroom. Over time, they became part of how I approached projects outside it.

Building Foodstood

The programme eventually brought the different subjects together through a group project.

I worked with Niko from Computer Science UGM and Sabine from Germany on an idea called Foodstood, short for Food for Students. The project explored a digital solution around food waste, and our team developed the idea throughout the programme before presenting it during the final keynote session.

The project gave us a place to apply several things we had been discussing during the previous two weeks. There was ideation, customer thinking, business considerations, project planning, and eventually the challenge of explaining the proposal clearly to an audience.

The final presentation was also preceded by a dedicated speech and presentation session. We received feedback on how to structure the idea, communicate it clearly, build confidence during a presentation, and avoid language that could make the message unnecessarily difficult to understand.

By the final day, the experience had moved quite naturally from learning frameworks to having to use them.

Bringing the Experience Back to UGM

After the programme ended, I returned to a more academic question: how did everything I had learned at Samara fit into my Computer Science programme at UGM?

The original document behind this article was actually prepared as a Summary Report of Course Conversion. As part of the process, I mapped the Samara programme against MII213506 Manajemen Proyek Teknologi Informasi at UGM.

That exercise turned out to be useful in its own way.

Digital Tools and Agile could be connected to project organization and project tools. Ideation and Design Thinking related closely to project proposals and requirements. Market Analysis, Business Models, and Customer Development brought another dimension to budgeting and market considerations. Risk Management and Conflict & Negotiation connected naturally with project risk and human resource management, while Intellectual Property added a legal perspective to project certification and protection.

Writing the conversion report forced me to articulate those connections explicitly.

Instead of remembering the programme as a collection of classes, I had to explain what each session contributed, where it overlapped with my studies at UGM, and what additional perspectives it introduced.

That process probably helped the lessons stick around longer than I expected.

Looking Back

At the time, I mostly saw Samara as an international winter programme that happened to fit neatly alongside my studies at UGM.

I liked the programme because it was structured well, the classes were practical, the organizers kept recordings accessible, and the international setting made the discussions more interesting. In my original closing notes, I also wrote that I could imagine the experience being even better in an offline setting.

Several years later, I remember it for something slightly different.

It was one of the earlier places where I encountered concepts that would continue appearing throughout my work: customer development, design thinking, project management, Agile, risk, negotiation, intellectual property, and presenting an idea clearly enough for other people to act on it.

None of those subjects felt particularly dramatic when I was sitting in front of my laptop at 6 PM in Jakarta.

They simply accumulated, one evening at a time.

And somewhere between the Miro boards, Scrum exercises, group discussions, and a final presentation about food waste, I started building a vocabulary for the kind of work I would keep doing afterwards.