Dear students, postgraduates, and colleagues!

I heartily congratulate you on a wonderful summer holiday – Youth Day!

Our students, graduates, enrollees, young scientists, and employees are the core of the creative potential of the region, its labour, intellectual, and creative resource. The vector of the university leadership in the coming years is precisely youth policy, which affects not only the development of youth science, entrepreneurship, professional, and personal fulfilment, but also determines the civic position of young people, their patriotism, which is the main moral value.

Young people actively participate in the life of Saratov State University and show high results in studies, research, arts, volunteering, successfully promote their innovative ideas, and win convincing victories at prestigious competitions, festivals, and contests.

Almost half of the grants of Russian Science Foundation carried out this year at SSU are projects led by young people (30 out of 61). According to the results of the 2023 competitions, eight people have received a scholarship from the Russian President, twenty people – scholarships from the Russian government. According to the 2022 results, 116 projects of young researchers of the university received financial support.

Our students are members of the expert council of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, the Commission on Education and Science of the Youth Parliament under the State Duma of the Russian Federal Assembly. Recently, some of them have organised and held the PROarts 2.0 regional forum and brought victories in the nominations of the All-Russian Student Spring, presented their projects at the Turiade and iVolga, and became the owners of grants from Rosmolodezh. This is not the whole list of achievements of our activists.

Youth has many wonderful qualities – beauty, energy, the will to win. They are especially necessary at the beginning of life, when thousands of roads are open, but you need to choose one – the right one.

I sincerely hope you will implement the most daring projects and plans. I wish you happiness, well-being, inexhaustible optimism, and good luck in all projects. May your young years be rich, bright, and memorable!

• Rector of Saratov State University
• Aleksei Chumachenko