just keep swimming college essay

Heroes: What They Do & Why We Need Them

A commentary on today's heroes, just keep swimming: dory’s heroic lesson to the world.

“When life gets you down do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”

Even if Dory left no other impression on anyone watching Finding Nemo , there is no doubt she left this saying somewhere in everyone’s head. And unless you are predetermined to not enjoy a movie, or honestly even if you are, Dory is a character that does not fail to bring smiles and laughs to watchers.

I’m convinced it is impossible to watch Finding Nemo without feeling happy just watching Dory’s spirited, hilarious actions and constant positive attitude. Despite her short-term memory loss and lack of personal connection to the problem, Dory’s optimism and selflessness makes Dory the perfect fish to go on a dangerous and life-changing journey with an overly cautious father searching for his son.

Dory was called on a mission solely by her genuine kind-hearted spirit… well, that and her clumsiness. When Dory swims right into a frantic, distraught clown fish, she does not realize she is stepping into an incredible and unthinkable journey. Unlike every other fish, Dory does not get agitated or swim away from Marlin; instead, her friendliness leads her to selflessly offer help and knowledge to a complete stranger without hesitation. And while she does forget what she is doing a few times, she jumps at the chance to help with equal excitement every single time.

However, Dory is always her true self and never fails to support Marlin, who she only met a few hours ago. She is able to put Marlin first despite his insensitivity to her feelings because she genuinely cares about helping, just as a hero would. Dory’s positive outlook on life and trust in those around her is the only thing that got the two of them through the journey to find Nemo.

Marlin and Dory hit rock bottom when they reach the harbor and think Nemo is dead. Marlin leaves Dory in a state of despair despite their growing friendship, and Dory is left alone and back in a confused state of forgetfulness.

But of course, just as things seem truly hopeless, Nemo appears well and alive! Nemo perfectly resembles Dory’s kindness to Marlin as he swims up to Dory to help a confused and sad stranger. With this encounter, Dory remembers everything, and they are able to find Marlin and rejoin the father and son!

Despite Dory’s constant happiness, it is clear she was missing a family and true confidence in herself. With Marlin and Nemo, Dory’s memory is better than ever, showing that she gains confidence through having a support system. She finds a family in her new friends and returns home with them, completing their broken family as well.

Dory was a hero to Marlin, bringing him optimism and hope when he had none. Dory was a hero to Nemo, overcoming her forgetfulness to find and save him. Dory was a hero to their family, bringing Marlin and Nemo back together with a bond they were missing before. And Dory is a hero to every person facing challenges in life, presenting the power of optimism and bringing a smile to our faces even in the darkest times.

Every person will struggle in their lives. Every person will face a situation where it feels they have no control. But Dory reminds us there is one thing we always have power over: our personal actions. She introduces a positive outlook on the idea that no matter how hard things seem, we must keep moving if we are going to get through it.

“Just keep swimming.”

Keep trying. Push through. You will make it out on the other side.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Casey Merz is an undergraduate student at the University of Richmond. She wrote this essay as part of her course requirement while enrolled in Dr. Scott Allison’s Heroes & Villains class.

Just keep swimming - UVA prompt - a quote that inspires you and can inspire others

aes1999 2 / 2 Dec 19, 2016 #1 UVA prompt- a quote that inspires you and can inspire others Children's movies are the best genre. Although this is a little biased coming from a self proclaimed Disney fanatic, whose Netflix suggestion box is rated for those between ages eight and twelve, it is a proclamation that I will bring to my grave. Today's "popular" films spend too much on explosions and costumes that it distracts from the overall theme. Movies should do more than entertain us for an hour and a half, rather they should teach us something to apply to our lives. I have seen "Finding Nemo" about a hundred times, each time, leaving with Dory's catch phrase "just keep swimming" stuck in my head for a week. It's a simple but inspiring phrase. There have been times in my life where it would have been easier for me to turn around or have given up, but if I did that then I wouldn't be where I am today. Dory teaches us that sometimes it is best to sacrifice our time in order to help others who need it most. For the past two years I have spent three hours every Sunday night volunteering at the hospital. I have unfortunately seen things that I will never be able to forget, things which left me feeling heartbroken, but rather than quit I decided to continue on with my journey to help those who need comfort the most. "Just keep swimming" is an easy, recognizable phrase that can be applied to many aspects of life to help people to continue through their hardships and to help others do the same, just as it has helped me to do so.

martinmengqian 3 / 6 Dec 19, 2016 #2 @aes1999 Hi Aubrey! I am also working on the essays of UVA and I find your idea quite inspiring! However, to me it might be better if you elaborate less on the general things of films. Rather, you can just tell a story of yourself with an emphasis on how you get courage and power from "Just keep swimming." The overall idea is pretty cool and I wish you good luck Anbrey, hopefully we become classmates :-D

Home — Application Essay — National Universities — Swimming Against Fear: Overcoming My Aquatic Ordeal

Swimming Against Fear: Overcoming My Aquatic Ordeal

University: SUNY Binghamton University

About this sample

Words: 866 |

Published: Jul 18, 2018

Words: 866 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Staring up at the deflected rays of sunlight as I slowly descended toward the bottom of the swimming pool, I began to realize the severity of my situation. As I fought to keep water from flooding my lungs, fear started inundating my mind. Only moments ago I had been sitting comfortably along the side of the pool, my feet dangling in the pleasant water. But now, as I sank lower, the water no longer felt warm. The sun was no longer baking my sun-screened back. Warmth was now replaced by a stingingly cold fear as my feet touched down on the smooth ceramic tiles. The bright sky appeared distorted by the twelve feet of calm water above me.

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Panic forced me to flail my arms and legs in a desperate attempt to propel myself to the top, but I had never learned to swim and these awkward movements had frighteningly little effect. Death seemed inevitable when holding my breath became increasingly difficult. I felt like I had been under for hours, but only a few seconds had elapsed from the moment I foolishly dove into the deep end. Usually I avoided the diving board, but that day my embarrassment about not being able to swim trumped my fear and common sense. At the bottom of the pool my feeble act of bravery couldn’t save me; my survival instincts were not good enough to overcome my inability to swim. Just then I heard the muffled sound of a whistle above me, and a lifeguard swam me up to the surface.

Not surprisingly, this traumatic event made me, a ten year-old boy, terrified of water. Adding even more anxiety was the fact that I was scheduled to leave for summer camp two weeks after the near drowning. As suggested by its name – Surprise Lake Camp – many of the activities there involved swimming and water. Unbeknownst to me, my parents had sent me to the camp in part so that I could learn to swim, but the first “Instructional Swimming” class was humiliating. That day, the counselors tested each camper’s swimming proficiency. When my turn came, I refrained from even attempting to pass the test. Informing the lifeguard that I was not able to swim made me feel inferior to the rest of the boys in my group, who passed with ease. My parents, realizing that perhaps I was not ready to enter the water, requested that I be excused from all activities involving swimming.

My initial reaction to their intervention was one of relief. However, being the lone camper who was excused made me feel isolated from my friends. I excelled at other sports and activities, but my inability to swim overshadowed them. At the conclusion of camp, I realized that I could not let one instance of failure create such an overwhelming fear in me. I decided to dedicate the second half of that summer to learning how to swim and removing the black cloud from over my head.

Motivated, I returned home in August with a clear goal, and my father was happy to see that I was determined to learn how to swim. With a month left until school began, my father and I agreed to go to the local swimming pool every day for several hours. However, the first time we went to the pool, my eagerness to succeed in this new venture mingled with doubt. The last time I went into a swimming pool, I had to be rescued by a lifeguard. Nevertheless, I joined my father in the shallow end of the pool, and after a few minutes of jitters, I calmed down.

The first day did not include any lessons on swimming, but rather just allowed me to get acclimated to being back in the water. During subsequent sessions my father taught me the fundamentals of swimming. Success did not come easily at the beginning. My movements were awkward and uncoordinated, but I was not deterred. My father’s support and instruction allowed me to steadily improve my technique. Paying close attention to every word he said and every move he made, I was able to glean important information on how to succeed. As the weeks progressed my comfort level in the pool increased dramatically. My movements no longer seemed forced, and I looked forward to our trips to the pool were. Finally, one day, I was ready to swim laps by myself. As I completed the strokes with confidence, I was filled with pride.

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The sense of achievement will always bring a smile to my face. After being shell-shocked from this near death experience I had thought I would never enter a swimming pool again. However, after realizing that avoiding water was irrational, I committed myself to improve upon a weakness. Relentlessly practicing with my father, I was able to overcome my fear of water. This became the first time I witnessed how diligence and hard work can lead to positive results. There will be many instances throughout my life where I will fail. However, I now know that failures are not necessarily absolute. My weaknesses will be transformed into strengths through strong commitment and a solid work ethic.

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Should we “just keep swimming”?

By Luna Sarti

Several recent publications in the environmental humanities discuss the need for new ways of experiencing and imagining the world around us, with the aim to free ourselves from what Ursula K. Le Guin called the “one-way future consisting only of growth” ( A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be ). In the hopes of forging a new (possibly less gloomy) future, scholars across disciplines, from art and landscape studies to field biology, call for slower practices of knowledge that can train us “to pay better attention” and to recover “those pasts we need to see the world more clearly” ( Arts of living on a damaged planet G1-2). Walking has become an increasingly popular practice for fostering slowness and for attuning individuals to new ways of experiencing the world and to the forgotten histories embedded in our physical landscapes, particularly in socially engaged art. Less common, but equally interesting, is the idea to turn to swimming as a way to explore waterscapes and regain the perception of our environments as terraqueous assemblages. In Waterlog (2000), filmmaker and writer Roger Deakin provides readers with a wonderful example of what it means to re-imagine life from inside waters. It is an intriguing vision which exhorts us to recognize how learning processes train us to see certain things, while others are assigned to the background and thus remain blurred. Compared to other practices, swimming certainly allows us to unsettle the contemporary land-centered attitudes that tend to dominate institutional education and scholarship. However, one might wonder how to translate the concept of swimming into practice. Contemporary swimming techniques are, in fact, another byproduct of modernity and were developed in order to make the human body move as fast and efficiently as possible when in water.

Swimming seems to be an unusual object of history, but it is indeed a product of history. In its most common understanding, leisure swimming in pools and the sea, using standard techniques such as breaststroke, free style, backstroke, and butterfly is actually the result of specific political and cultural processes. Although humans have a long history with waters and references to swimming appear in different civilizations and throughout various sources, contemporary techniques have only recently been standardized according to criteria that are largely based on modern re-readings of Roman swimming traditions and that foster ideas of speed and efficiency when the human body is placed in water.

A few scholars have engaged in recovering ancient and pre-modern cultures of swimming, most noticeably Ralph Thomas (1905), Nicholas Orme (1983), Richard Mandell (1984) and Jean-Paul Thuillier (2004). Historian Jean-Paul Thuillier discusses how only the Romans, and not the Greeks, practiced swimming, drawing on Grimal’s suggestion that “a transformation in the sporting habits occurred in Rome, with swimming taking over from racing or wrestling”, as the presence of water in training fields seems to indicate (421). According to Orme, there is no doubt that swimming was in use among the Germanic peoples during the years of Caesar and that it was not only practiced but also praised across Roman, Germanic, and Norse civilizations. From the evidence and the analyses presented in the works on the history of swimming, it seems reasonable to state that in most cases swimming was given a higher status when associated with martial practices.

The most extensive references to swimming do, in fact, occur in texts describing military history or training, most noticeably in Plutarch and Suetonius, who both recount episodes in which Caesar’s heroism and strength emerge through his extraordinary swimming skills. Such a connection between swimming and heroism characterizes also Vegetius’ Epitoma Rei Militaris , in which the ability to swim is described as necessary for soldiers, not only to cross rivers in the absence of bridges but also in the case of sudden floods (Book 1, chapter 10).

There certainly is an incredibly high number of references to swimming practices across authors as different as Caesar, Horace, Cato the Elder, and Seneca. In most cases, swimming does imply a specific way to engage with waters which is associated with what we might describe as ‘Promethean undertakings’, either over the physical environment or against less skilled enemies. At times, one can deduce swimming practices of the time, for example in his Astronomica , Manlius seems to describe something similar to butterfly and breaststroke (Vol. 5, p. 422).

Now lifting one arm after the other to make slow sweeps he will catch the eye as he drives a furrow of foam through the sea and will sound afar as he thrashes the waters; now like a hidden two-oared vessel he will draw apart his arms beneath the water; now he will enter the waves upright and swim by walking and, pretending to touch the shallows with his feet, will seem to make a field of the surface of the sea; else, keeping his limbs motionless and lying on his back or side, he will be no burden to the waters but will recline upon them and float, the whole of him forming a sail-boat not needing oarage (Translated by G. P. Goold).

Although no Latin author appears to have written a major work of instruction on the subject, and thus it is hard to assess what the word swimming (natare) meant at the time, the examples above seem to suggest that the concept was often associated with strength, conquest, and human mastery.

Interestingly enough, in medieval times there seems to emerge a tendency to depreciate the status of swimming for the same reasons that make it valuable in most Latin texts. It has also been observed how the section on swimming in Vegetius’ treatise is sometimes omitted in medieval copies ( Chaline 101). Such a tendency is particular evident in both the tradition of biblical commentary and in courtly literature. Authors such as Gregory the Great and Bartholomeus Anglicus stress the dangers of water and minimize the human ability to survive in the element by his own exertions whether one can swim or not. Moreover, while Caesar and the heroes of Northern sagas are described as excelling in this practice which plays a significant role in their heroic achievements, the heroes of the chansons de geste and the romances are rarely or never depicted as swimming. According to Orme, swimming is rarely attributed to the knightly heroes of medieval tradition, and “was indeed seen rather as alien and incompatible with their usual behaviour” (33).

Historians of swimming agree in identifying a significant change in attitudes towards the practice during the 16th century when swimming is mentioned in educational literature and manuals on the subject start to circulate. Swimming is variously discussed in treatises such as The governor by Sir Thomas Elyot (1531), Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (1528), The schoolmaster by Roger Asham (1564) and Richard Mulcaster’s Positions (1581). According to Thomas and Orme, the first work to be entirely devoted to swimming was Wyman’s Colymbetes, sive de arte natandi: dialogus et festivus et iucundus lectu (1538), in which Wyman explains how to swim using the popular form of a dialogue between two characters, Pampirus and Erotes. However, the first illustrated treatise on the practice is considered to be Everard Digby’s De arte natandi , which appeared in England in 1587 and describes both how and where to swim.

Although it has been observed how 16th-century swimming theories targeted literate nobility and gentry, and largely evolved as analytical speculation on the ‘ideal forms of swimming’ which might have had little influence on contemporary swimming practices, it is still significant that such a theoretical interest developed in the first place. European theorists began, in fact, to publish treatises on swimming in a time that is marked by overseas expansion, human mastery, and colonialism.

In an essay entitled Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World , historian Kevin Dawson has recently demonstrated how the interest in swimming that characterizes the 16th century is entangled with overseas expansionism, extraction economy, and violence. Not only did Europeans employ a high number of ‘enslaved divers’ in the Americas to collect pearls and to recover goods from sunken ships, drawing on native populations first and later on Africans, but they also looked at the swimming techniques of these skilled slaves who adopted variants of the freestyle which were unknown to Europeans. Such a connection between colonialism, slavery, and the development of swimming techniques casts another troublesome shade on the process that lead to the formation of standardized swimming styles.

It is perhaps ironic that a practice which is now associated either with leisure or forms of ‘returns to ecological statuses’ seems to have been fostered into higher social status and standardization not only in relation to conceptions of health and physical force, but also in association with practices of conquest and dominance, either over the physical world or other populations. As a swimmer and a strong believer in practices of care (as theorized for engaged environmental humanities), I wonder what implications this history has in the way we approach swimming and if this affects what we see from and inside the water. Perhaps it is an irrelevant question, but – should we be reconsidering the way we swim?

Luna is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores the shifting cultures and practices of water that bound the Arno river in Florence. In her dissertation, she analyzes site-specific medieval and early modern narratives of flooding to discuss if, when, and how flood is to be considered a “natural disaster.”

Featured Image: Woodcut from Everard Digby’s De arte natandi .

May 20, 2019

May 21, 2019 at 4:50 pm

Something else to read is Arnd Kruger’s essay, “Swimming and the Emergence of the Modern Spirit,” in McClelland and Merrilees (eds) Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Toronto 2009, pp. 407-29

May 21, 2019 at 5:35 pm

You mention that swimming virtually disappeared from medieval texts. I think this is because it was viewed as utilitarian (you imply this) and therefore not suitable for the aristocracy (the literate class). In fact, in the tale Puss in Boots, the marquis de Carabas convinces the king he is of the nobility precisely because he can’t swim… In France, swimming is seen as a popular sport, something J-J Rousseau suggested should be taught instead of equestrian exercises, because swimming was useful where riding a horse was rarely a question of life and death. So contemporary swimming may have something of a mixed pedigree: a symbol of colonial oppression or higher social status in some places, while elsewhere a popular sport linked to republicanism and public health. I wonder, too, about swimming in Hungary where it was linked to national identity and where water polo, in particular, became a symbol of resistance against the Soviet Union. Ultimately, I think the symbolic currency depends on when and where swimming is/was described.

May 24, 2019 at 5:45 am

This is wonderful. ps. The French anthropologist/sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote about the cultural and social making/shaping of all kinds of bodily activities like swimming, about navy sailors unable to swim and so on, in his 1935 long essay “Techniques of the Body.” Various translations exist, such as in _Techniques, technology and civilisation_ / Marcel Mauss ; edited and introduced by Nathan Schlanger. New York: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 77-96.

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Is my essay about my life in swim good for a college essay? Answered

We lived in Arizona, at least a mile away from everything, in the middle of the desert. My parents put me on a competitive swim team when I was five and then stopped when we moved to Colorado when I was six.

I didn’t start swimming again until the summer after fifth grade on my local swim team. My summers consisted of early wake-ups and swimming. For years, I was only on the team because my parents made me. I dreaded each morning I had to wake up for practice. I didn’t care if it was good exercise or even if I was slightly good at it. Each practice I counted down the minutes until my uphill bike home.

My opinion didn’t change until the summer of 2020 when the world shut down. I woke up every morning that summer wishing I was at the pool instead. I missed seeing my teammates, the ones I didn’t want to know and wasn’t friends with. I missed being in the water. I started my freshman year of high school online, waiting for winter to come around so I could swim again.

The first day of practice came and I was so out of shape, but I was ecstatic to be there. I finally could see other people. This practice changed everything for me. Swimming and I became inseparable. When seasons ended, I counted the days until the next started and swam on my own in off-seasons.

Over the years, my main stroke changed a lot. Backstroke, breaststroke, repeat. Never butterfly, never IM. That was until the summer after sophomore year, 2022. My coaches made me race the 100-meter butterfly and 200-meter IM every meet. I struggled on the inside. I felt as if I was drowning and no one could save me, but my times said the opposite. Every race I dropped more and more time. I became confident in these events and got good at them. I made it to finals in both of them. My main events became clear.

High school season came around and I froze. A fear of not being good enough came over me like a dark cloud on a stormy day. Every meet I couldn’t bring myself to race 100 fly. My cloud stayed until there was a month left in the season. The thought of state made me say What if I made it in fly? From then on, I only swam 100 fly.

Swim and Dive league meet, finals, February 2023. My time was 2 seconds away from making state.“Swimmers, take your mark…” says the starter. Beep , the buzzer goes and I take off. The first 50 meters flew by. I took a breath and caught a glimpse of the clock, 31 seconds. I can make it, go a little faster. I make my turn and start the next 25. My underwater became much longer. I was a little behind, but nothing I couldn’t make up in the last 25 meters. Keep going. I hit the wall. I don’t even try to catch my breath and look at the clock. 1:07.69. Did I make it? My brain starts to clear my scattered thoughts. No. 0.69 seconds away from the state cut. I messed up. I dropped time but then started sobbing. I didn’t talk to my coaches after my race due to fear of disappointment. My parents came down to the deck to congratulate my PR. Seeing them just made it worse. I thought I failed them, my team, my coaches. I talked to my coach and he told me I’m going to state in the relay. My month of hard work had paid off. I had the fastest split on the team. I made it. This made me vow to never let fear get in the way of future success.

Earn karma by helping others:

The essay topic is good if executed well. Instead of finishing with the lesson you learned, I would add examples of how you have incorporated that into your life so we can see your growth. I would also try to come up with a more creative hook so it leaves people intrigued and wanting to read more.

As someone who can get bored easily, I would advise you to break your last paragraph into parts, that way it feels easier to read and the flow is better.

This is a well written essay BUT make sure it speaks to who you are. I am sure this swimming experience was life changing for you, but how? What did you learn? How did you change? The admissions officers want to "meet" you through the essay and get a taste of who you are. You may want to cut back on the descriptions (though they are well written and you should be proud of them) and include more about how this shaped you to be the person you are today. Helpful information to check out: bigfuture.collegeboard.org/plan-for-college/your-college-application/essay-hub/sample-college-essay-1

Hope this is helpful. You are a great writer!

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Just Keep Swimming by Rokaya

Rokaya's entry into Varsity Tutor's September 2022 scholarship contest

Just Keep Swimming by Rokaya - September 2022 Scholarship Essay

Just Keep Swimming The whistle had blown. I stepped up onto the block in lane four wearing my silver swim cap, all-black full-length swimsuit, and white goggles, mentally preparing for my 100-yard freestyle event. I then pulled my goggles over onto my eyes and waited for the announcer to tell us to take our marks. He paused for a moment as a DQ Official walked over to the woman timing me and whispered something in her ears, scratching my name from her scorecard. As he walked away, she told me to step down from the block and that I had been disqualified. “You are not allowed to compete, you have been removed from all of your swimming events.” Unfortunately, I quickly knew what had happened. Because I looked different, and my skin was less exposed, I was removed from all of my races before I had even touched the water. It hurt that not only was I the only Muslim-American Woman to be a swimmer in any meets but mostly because I wasn’t accepted for who I was. Even so, I shocked everyone by stepping back up onto my block and waiting to take my mark. Though it was difficult, I attempted to block out the noise, the looks, and the questions and dove into the water. I sang the melody in my head, “When life gets you down, just keep swimming, just keep swimming” for the 1 minute and 12 seconds that I had been underwater. I waited in the water as everyone was finishing their final lap and shook hands with the girl who came in a few seconds after I did. I said to her, “Congratulations on winning first place.” As difficult as this experience was, I would not have been as tough as I have become today. I now proudly and confidently cover my body from head to toe. This event made me the strong, empowered, Muslim-American woman I am now. I didn’t take no for an answer as a result of being different. When trying out for varsity soccer the following year, I hardly noticed the looks I was getting as obvious as they may have been. And the year after that, I was awarded Player of the Game in two games, and Most Valuable Player on my team. In every moment of hardship, and whenever I hit a struggle, I learned to remember, that when life gets you down, just keep swimming.

Duke Daytime MBA Student Blog

25 interesting facts about me.

To give you a better idea of how you might respond to Fuqua's application question, here’s my list of 25 Random Things.

Published November 13, 2012

This year’s application includes an untraditional essay question which asks applicants for a list of 25 random things. Read more about the new essay question in this blog post from the Director of Admissions. To give you a better idea of how you might respond to the question, here’s my list of 25 Random Things:

I love puns and clever jokes and plays on words. I love Scrabble but don’t like Words with Friends because you can use words that don’t really exist.
I quote Finding Nemo often. I once started a “Just keep swimming” chant during a UVa football game across the 60,000 person stadium when they were down in the final minute of a big game.
I love DIY television shows, blogs, and magazines although I don’t own a house or know how to safely use a power tool.
I participated in Holi in Jaipur, India, this past March. My classmates from India didn’t warn me that my scalp and fingernails would be pink for a whole week!
I started reading The Wall Street Journal at age 18 (I had it delivered to my college dorm). However, I still skip the Money and Investing sections more often than not.
I organize my cookbooks by color. It’s just prettier that way.
I did catering in college and probably cut more than 50 wedding cakes (the secret is to dip the knife in hot water between slices for the cleanest pieces).
I met my husband at a leadership conference in high school . . . seriously.

visiting my childhood home in Lexington, Kentucky was 1 of my 25 random things

When I play golf, I sometimes make people turn around so they can’t watch me tee off.
Every year we organize a “Generational Celebrational” in the fall and invite our friends from the University of Virginia and their parents for an Olympics between the ages. Then we head to a football game in our orange and navy.
I consistently have a pile of books on my nightstand ready for reading, yet I continue to buy new ones to add to the pile.
I drove to the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis with 7 other people from Fuqua in an RV and camped outside the stadium for three days. We never made it to the game but we set up a TV outside of the RV with the stadium in the background.

making homeade spaghetti and meatballs with my family was 1 of my 25 random things

I have a ridiculously good penguin dance. It was so good that I wrote my college essay about it and got in.
I have a freckle at the end of my nose that is perfectly centered. I have often wondered if people would look at me differently if it wasn’t. It’s also coincidental since my maiden name means “nose” in Italian.
I auditioned for the high school talent show singing a Dixie Chicks duet with my best friend. They canceled the show before we found out if we made it in . . .
I used to build model cars in high school and tried to bargain with my parents to buy a 1969 Chevelle but instead I got a 1996 Toyota Camry that was not mine but rather the “third family car that only I drove.”

My mom's graduation day from grad school was 1 of my 25 random things

I don’t like shows that make you feel uncomfortable and often have to leave the room when they are playing. This mostly includes anything that has the following actors: Jim Carrey, Dave Chapelle, or Sacha Baron Cohen.
I can’t work or read with the television on in the background but love listening to music instead.
I lost the second grade spelling bee in extra rounds on the word “friend” to this kid nicknamed “The Brain.” To this day, I am fearful of spelling any words that have “ie” or “ei” unless spellcheck is available.
I took a 4-week long cross-country road trip with two of my friends after college (to California and back to the East Coast). We slept in a place called the Border Inn which sat on the border of two time zones so the time changed when you walked between the bedroom and bathroom of the motel room.
It took me over two years, but I finally have the courage (and the fitness) to run the Washington Duke “WaDuke” trail.
I set my alarm at weird times (e.g., 7:23 am or 6:47 am). Subconsciously, I think it must be like those speed limit signs that are 19 mph in neighborhoods — it’s meant to catch your attention.

See more examples from and insight on Fuqua’s 25 Random Things essay

Why Pursuing an MBA Surprised Even Me

The MBA also offered an ability to build practical skills and dive deeper into specific areas of interest.

Staying in Touch With Admissions While on the Waitlist

Applicants on the waitlist can (and should) interact with the admissions office in a variety of ways.

Just Keep Swimming

Stories from a Thoughtful Boomer

Publications

memoir that matters

The ground begins to shake in the table of contents, and by the introduction the first crack has opened up underneath our feet –William F. Pinar praise for Queer South Rising

I am a curriculum theorist who blogs about growing up and living in the South as a gay Christian. I write in an easy-flowing, often humorous narrative style of memoir.

My book, This Corner of Canaan: Curriculum Studies of Place & the Reconstruction of the South was published by Peter Lang in 2007. Here are endorsements for the book:

This remarkable book combines passion and honesty to remind us why the South still matters so much in American life. Writing in a voice entirely her own, [Whitlock] shows us a South that is both profoundly new and profoundly old. Edward L. Ayers, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus, University of Richmond.

“As one both deeply familiar with and perpetually puzzled by the United States ‘South,’ I found [Whitlock’s] careful rendering of the contradictions of nostalgia, mystery, home, and grace insightful in its evocation of the lived and yet-to-be-lived meanings of place. She offers those of us who navigate this landscape of lushness and sensuality of silences and normalization, ways to think about how we can contribute to rescripting the meanings of this particularly queer social geography. Susan Talburt, Professor and Director, Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University.

Queer South Rising: Voices of a Contested Place is a 2013 collection of essays about the South by people who identify as both Southern and queer. Topics range from religion, politics, sexuality, race, and education, inviting readers interested in the South and queer themes to engage with the narratives it holds. This collection shatters perceptions about a nostalgic, romanticized Southern culture in general. Here are endorsements by one of my favorite writers, Dorothy Allison, scholar E. Patrick Johnson, and my friend and mentor, Bill Pinar:

This is simply wonderful! Reading these pieces is invigorating–like getting a call from my mama–as if she had never died and had just been hiding out in the mountains somewhere. Suddenly I feel like I am not alone, that I have family close by. These essays are resonate powerful tales and wonderfully complicated examinations of what most of the world does not even acknowledge, my people and our messy lives. Dorothy Allison, Writer, Feminist, Activist; author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.

This collection is bound to stir things up. The ground begins to shake in the table of contents, and by the introduction the first crack has opened up underneath our feet. William F. Pinar, Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia.

For years the South has been neglected as a site of intellectual inquiry in queer studies. Queer South Rising fills this void by culling diverse voices to speak to the beauty and pain of living below the Mason-Dixon line. E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South and Black. Queer. Southern. Women: An Oral History. He is the chair of African American Studies and Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

About Ugena: A native of North Alabama, Ugena holds a B.S.Ed. in English and History from Athens State University, a M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction from Coppin State College, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction with a specialization in Curriculum Theory and Women’s & Gender Studies from Louisiana State University. She is Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and Women’s and Gender Studies at Kennesaw State University. She has a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree from the McAfee School of Theology, Mercer University.

More of Ugena’s work can be found on Ugena’s Faculty Page and Vitae

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"Just Keep Swimming"

Throughout the course of my eight grade year, I have faced many challenges, in terms of writing. This can be portrayed with a quote. Via Walt Disney’s Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, “Just keep swimming!” Dory, a fish in the story, repeats the phrase to emphasize will power and to just move on. This connects to the challenges I have faced throughout my eighth grade year. No matter how high the order, I have “Just kept swimming,” and met whatever challenges there may be. With the first writing piece of the year, “Why I Write”, I was faced with one of the most common and one of the most frustrating challenges known to writers; writer’s block. While writing this piece, for whatever reason, I could not convert my ideas to words on the paper. It was incomprehensible and extremely frustrating. However, I pushed through, broke the dead lock, and was able to convert many ideas that I had into words on the paper. I could have become overly frustrated and given up, but instead I “Just Kept Swimming,” and completed the piece. Following the “Why I Write” piece, I was faced with the daunting challenge of an eight-page screenplay. I found this assignment to be boldly challenging because of the eight-page requirement. Normally, we are not given length requirements for our pieces, but I found this eight-page one to be especially difficult. While writing the piece, I slowly began to realize that my story wouldn’t be long enough. When I thought I had finished, it wasn’t. With this, I persevered, and added in a little bit here, and a little bit there. I added enough so that my story just squeaked past eight pages. I “Just kept swimming,” and persevered through this piece. With my final writing piece of the year, my “Change in Time” piece, I was faced with the mountainous task of including thirty of our vocabulary words in my writing piece. Normally we are required to include ten, but thirty was a whole new mountain to climb. Initially, I found it challenging to incorporate many unfamiliar words into my writing. I took it upon myself to more closely understand each word and how it might be used in a sentence. Following this, the task became more doable, and I was able to incorporate all thirty. With the “Just keep swimming,” demeanor, I successfully used them all, after my initial struggles. In each of the aforementioned situations I was faced with a challenge. I was able to overcome each of them with a persevering, “Just keep swimming,” attitude. This sort of mindset is essential in not only writing, but in life. Each and every day, in a variety of ways, shapes and forms, we all “Just keep swimming!”

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Security Questions Emerge as First Charges Are Filed in Russia Attack

Russian officials formally charged four men in the attack, which killed at least 137 people at a Moscow-area concert hall on Friday. American officials blamed a branch of the Islamic State.

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A memorial outside the Crocus City Hall concert venue. Reuters
People waiting to visit a memorial at Crocus City Hall. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Leaving flowers outside the site of the attack. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Mourners at a memorial in St. Petersburg, Russia. Anton Vaganov/Reuters
Firefighters and rescuers clearing debris after the deadly attack. Reuters
Police officers outside the Basmanny District Court in Moscow. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
People waited to donate blood near Crocus City Hall on Saturday. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
A flag flying at half-staff as policemen guard the closed entrance to Red Square in Moscow. Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA, via Shutterstock
A billboard on Saturday noted the date of the concert hall attack in Moscow. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
The Crocus City Hall concert venue in suburban Moscow after it was attacked Friday night. Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Paul Sonne and Neil MacFarquhar

Here’s what to know about the attack.

Russian officials have brought charges against four men they said were responsible for a fiery terrorist attack on a suburban Moscow concert venue that killed at least 137 people last week.

Four men were arraigned late Sunday night on terrorism charges in the attack at Crocus City Hall, just outside the Russian capital. A court spokesman identified them as Dalerjon Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, Shamsidin Fariduni and Muhammadsobir Fayzov, a 19-year-old who appeared in court in a wheelchair, according to Russian media outlets.

Mr. Mirzoyev, Mr. Rachabalizoda and Mr. Fariduni told the court they were from Tajikistan, and Russian media outlets reported that Mr. Fayzov was also from the Central Asian nation. All four had visible injuries; Mr. Rachabalizoda’s head was heavily bandaged and Mr. Fayzov had to be wheeled in and out of the courtroom.

Earlier Sunday — which had been declared a national day of mourning — people visited the scene of the attack to lay flowers and light candles at a memorial. Scores of people waited in a long line under a gray sky, many clutching red bouquets, as efforts were underway inside to dismantle the remains of the stage. Flags were lowered to half-staff at buildings across the country, and state media released a video of President Vladimir V. Putin lighting a memorial candle in a church.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law-enforcement body, said on Sunday that 137 bodies had been recovered from the charred premises, including those of three children. It said that 62 victims had been identified so far and that genetic testing was underway to identify the rest.

There are two primary narratives about the violence on Friday night, Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years . American officials say it was the work of Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, an Islamic State offshoot that has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran . But on Saturday, Mr. Putin did not mention ISIS in his first public remarks on the tragedy , and hinted at the possible involvement of Ukraine, which has issued a strong denial .

Here’s what to know:

The search for survivors ended on Saturday, as details about the victims began to emerge . Many of the more than 100 people wounded in the attack were in critical condition. The search for bodies continues.

As Russia mourned, the war in Ukraine continued. Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 43 out of 57 Russian missiles and drones launched overnight against different parts of the country. And Ukraine’s military said it had struck two large landing ships that were part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. There was no immediate comment from Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Piknik, the Russian rock band that was to play a sold-out concert at the suburban venue on the night it was attacked and burned to rubble, now finds itself at the center of the tragedy .

The attack dealt a political blow to Mr. Putin , a leader for whom national security is paramount.

Neil MacFarquhar

Four suspects from Tajikistan appeared in court with injuries and signs of having been beaten.

The four men suspected of carrying out a bloody attack on a concert hall near Moscow, killing at least 137 people, were arraigned in a district court late Sunday and charged with committing a terrorist act.

The four, who were from Tajikistan but worked as migrant laborers in Russia, were remanded in custody until May 22, according to state and independent media outlets reporting from the proceedings, at Basmanny District Court. They face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The press service of the court only announced that the first two defendants, Dalerjon B. Mirzoyev and Saidakrami M. Rachalbalizoda, pleaded guilty to the charges. It did not specify any plea from the other two, Mediazona, an independent news outlet, reported.

The men looked severely battered and injured as each of them was brought into the courtroom separately. Videos of them being tortured and beaten while under interrogation circulated widely on Russian social media.

Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, a 19-year-old barber and the youngest of the men charged, was rolled into the courtroom from a hospital emergency room on a tall, orange wheelchair, attended by a doctor, the reports said. He sat propped up in the wheelchair inside the glass cage for defendants, wearing a catheter and an open hospital gown with his chest partially exposed. Often speaking in Tajik through a translator, he answered questions about his biography quietly and stammered, according to Mediazona.

Mr. Rachabalizoda, 30, had a large bandage hanging off the right side of his head where interrogators had sliced off a part of his ear and forced it into his mouth, the reports said, with the cutting captured in a video that spread online.

The judge allowed the press to witness only parts of the hearings, citing concerns that sensitive details about the investigation might be revealed or the lives of court workers put at risk. It is not an unusual ruling in Russia.

Russia’s Federal Security Services announced on Saturday that 11 people had been detained, including the four charged men, who were arrested after the car they were fleeing in was intercepted by the authorities 230 miles southwest of Moscow.

In the attack, on Friday night, four gunmen opened fire inside the hall just as a rock concert by the group Piknik was due to start. They also set off explosive devices that ignited the building and eventually caused its roof to collapse. Aside from the dead, there were 182 injured, and more than 100 remain hospitalized, according to the regional health ministry.

President Vladimir V. Putin used the fact that the highway where the men were detained leads to Ukraine to suggest that the attack was somehow linked to Ukraine’s war effort. But the United States has said repeatedly that the attack was the work of an extremist jihadi organization, the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility.

The first charged, Mr. Mirzoyev, who had a black eye and cuts and bruises all over his face, leaned for support against the glass wall of the court cage as the charge against him was read. Mr. Mirzoyev, 32, has four children and had a temporary residence permit in the southern Siberian city of Novosibirsk, but it had expired, the reports said.

Mr. Rachabalizoda, married with a child, said he was legally registered in Russia but did not remember where.

The fourth man charged, Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, married with an 8-month-old baby, worked in a factory producing parquet in the Russian city of Podolsk, just southwest of Moscow. He had also worked as a handyman in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the attack took place at Crocus City Hall, at a concert venue within a sprawling shopping complex just outside the Moscow city limits.

The Islamic State has been able to recruit hundreds of adherents among migrant laborers from Central Asia in Russia who are often angry about the discrimination they frequently face.

Alina Lobzina , Paul Sonne and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

Maps and Diagrams of the Moscow Concert Hall Attack

The mass shooting and arson at a suburban Moscow concert venue, which killed more than 130, were attributed by U.S. officials to members of a branch of the Islamic State.

The other two men charged in the attack are Shamsidin Fariduni, 26, and 19-year-old Muhammadsobir Fayzov, who appeared in court in a wheelchair. All four men who've been charged have been identified by a court spokesman on Telegram. They appeared separately before a judge on charges of committing a terrorist act and were remanded in custody until May 22.

Russian authorities have begun naming the suspects in the attack. The first two suspects have been identified as Dalerjon Mirzoyev and Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, according to state news agency RIA Novosti, which is reporting from the court. Both have been charged with committing a terrorist act and face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

RIA reported that Mirzoyev is a 32-year-old from Tajikistan who had an expired three-month permit to be in the southern Russian city of Novosibirsk. Less information was immediately released about Rachabalizoda, but state media reports said he was born in 1994.

Valerie Hopkins and Alina Lobzina

Concertgoers describe screams, smoke and stares of shock in a night of horror.

Once they heard the shots ring out on Friday night at Crocus City Hall, Efim Fidrya and his wife ran down to the building’s basement and hid with three others in a bathroom.

They listened as the gunfire began and thousands of people who had come to a sold-out rock concert on Moscow’s outskirts began screaming and trying to flee.

Horrified and scared, Mr. Fidrya did the only thing he could think to do: He held on tight to the bathroom door, which didn’t lock, trying to protect the group in case the assailants came to find them.

“While we could hear shooting and screaming, I stood the whole time holding the bathroom door shut,” Mr. Fidrya, an academic, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “The others were standing in the corner so that if someone started shooting through the door, they wouldn’t be in the line of fire.”

They didn’t know it then, but they were sheltering from what became Russia’s deadliest terror attack in two decades, after four gunmen had entered the popular concert venue and began shooting rapid-fire weapons.

Their story is one of many harrowing accounts that have emerged in the days since the attack, which killed at least 137 people. More than 100 injured people are hospitalized, some in critical condition, health officials said.

Mr. Fidrya’s small group waited and waited, but the attackers had started a fire in the complex and it was spreading. Mr. Fidrya’s wife, Olga, showed everyone how to wet their T-shirts and hold them to their faces so they could breathe without inhaling toxic smoke.

And then a second round of shots rang out.

After about half an hour, it was so smoky that Mr. Fidrya, 42, thought even the assailants must have left. As he ventured out, he saw the body of a dead woman lying by the escalator. Later he saw the body of another woman who had been killed in the carnage, her distraught husband standing over her.

His group went down into the parking garage and eventually emerged on the street as the emergency service workers were carrying victims from the building.

The Islamic State, through its news agency, claimed responsibility for the attack. U.S. officials said the assailants were believed to be part of ISIS-K, an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. On Saturday, Russia’s Federal Security Services announced that 11 people had been detained, including four who were arrested after the car they were fleeing in was intercepted by authorities 230 miles southwest of Moscow.

In interviews, survivors described how what started as a typical Friday night out devolved into a scene of panic and terror. The venue, which seated 6,200 people, had been sold out for a show by a veteran Russian band called Piknik.

Video footage from the scene shows the assailants shooting at the entrance to the concert venue, part of a sprawling, upscale complex of buildings that also includes a shopping mall and multiple exhibition halls. They then moved into the concert hall, where they sprayed gunfire as well, videos show.

The attackers also set the building on fire using a combination of explosives and flammable liquid, Russian authorities said.

Like the Fidryas, Tatyana Farafontova initially thought the sound of the shooting was part of the show.

“Five minutes before the show was supposed to start, we heard these dull claps,” she wrote on her VK social media page. Ms. Farafontova, 38, said in a direct message on Saturday that she was still in shock and was slurring her speech after the attack.

Then the claps got closer and someone shouted that there were attackers shooting. She scrambled onto the stage with the assistance of her husband.

“At the moment when we climbed onto the stage, three people entered the hall with machine guns,” she wrote in her VK account. “They shot at everything that moved. My husband from the stage saw bluish smoke filling the hall.”

Ms. Farafontova said that being on the center of the stage made her feel exposed and targeted.

“It felt as if they were poking me in the back with the muzzle of a machine gun,” she wrote, adding, “I could feel the breath of death right behind my shoulders.”

She crawled under the curtain and eventually followed the musicians, who had already started to flee, and ran as far as she could from the building.

Up on the balcony, Aleksandr Pyankov and his wife, Anna, heard the gunshots and lay on the floor for some time before joining others who jumped up and began running to the exit.

As they fled, they encountered a woman who had slumped down on an escalator and was blocking their route. She was alive but staring blankly ahead, Mr. Pyankov, a publishing executive, said. He told her to keep running, but then turned his head and saw what she was staring at.

“I started to look,” Mr. Pyankov, 51, said in a telephone interview. “And first I saw a murdered woman sitting on the sofa, and there was a young man lying next to her. I looked around and there were groups of bodies.”

It all happened in a matter of seconds, he said, and he tried to keep fleeing.

“The worst thing is that in this situation you’re not running away from the shooting, but toward it,” he said. “Because it was already clear that there would be a fire there, we know how it would burn. And you’re just running to figure out where else to run.”

Anastasiya Volkova lost both her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV, a state channel, that she had missed a call from her mother on Friday night at around the time of the assault. When she called back, there was no response, Ms. Volkova said.

“I couldn’t answer the phone. I didn’t hear the call,” Ms. Volkova told the broadcaster, adding that her mother had been “really looking forward to this concert.”

Accounts emerging about others who died in the assault also told tales of eager concertgoers who had made special efforts to get to the show.

Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, traveled hundreds of miles — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Mr. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present, the newspaper Komsomolsaya Pravda reported. He did not live to celebrate his 35th birthday, which is this week. Both he and his wife died in the attack.

And Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing Piknik , a heritage rock band that was playing the first of two sold-out concerts accompanied by a symphony orchestra.

Mr. Baklemyshev’s son told local media that his father had traveled solo from his hometown of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent him a video of the concert hall before the attack. That was the last he had heard from him.

“There was no last conversation,” his son said. “All that was left is the video, and nothing more.”

Mr. Fidrya said he felt grateful to be alive, and that four of the assailants had been captured.

“Now there is confidence that the crime will be solved and those non-humans who organized and carried it out will be punished,” he said. “This really helps a lot.”

But images of the victims remain seared in his memory, in particular that of the husband, his back burned from the fire, standing over his dead wife outside the building as medics attended to the wounded.

The man was talking to Mr. Fidrya’s wife, Olga, saying they were from the city of Tver northwest of Moscow, had been together for 12 years and had three children.

“For us it’s all over, by and large,” Mr. Fidrya wrote in a message after the phone interview. “But for that guy who stood over the body of his wife, and for their three children, the worst is yet to come. And there are so many people like him there.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law enforcement agency, released video of suspects being led, blindfolded, into its headquarters on Sunday. The agency said the investigation at the scene of the attack was continuing.

Ivan Nechepurenko

As questions about security failures swirl, Russian state media focus on a different narrative.

As Russia mourned the victims of the worst terrorist attack in the Moscow area in more than two decades on Sunday, differing narratives about the attack were spreading and taking hold in the country.

The attack late Friday on a concert hall near Moscow left at least 137 people dead and represented a significant security failure for the Kremlin. While the Russian authorities said they had arrested the four attackers, speculation over their identities and motivations was widespread. There also were open questions about whether Russia had adequately followed up on a warning from the United States about the threat of such an attack, and about how specific that warning was.

But most Russian commentators and state media devoted little time to those issues, instead pointing fingers elsewhere. The reaction reflected in part the state of anxiety that Russia has been living in since the start of the war in Ukraine, with propaganda outlets competing to advance one narrative, conspiracy theory or bit of speculation after another.

Many nationalist commentators and ultraconservative hawks on Sunday continued to push the idea that Ukraine was the obvious culprit, despite a claim of responsibility and mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State was responsible.

Hard-line anti-Kremlin activists speaking from abroad, meanwhile, speculated that the Russian state could have orchestrated the attack so that it could blame Ukraine or further tighten the screws inside the country.

Some lawmakers in Parliament argued that the government needed to get tough on migrants, after the authorities said that the four assailants were foreign citizens. Lawmakers also pledged to discuss whether capital punishment should be introduced in Russia.

“Different political forces are starting to use” the attack, said Aleksei Venediktov, a Russian journalist and commentator and the former editor of the influential Ekho Moskvy radio station. “The Kremlin, most of all,” he said in an interview broadcast on YouTube. “But others too, who say that it was all organized by the Kremlin.”

Some nationalist activists said that such a sense of disorientation could have been the attackers’ ultimate goal.

Yegor S. Kholmogorov, a Russian nationalist commentator, wrote in his blog on the Telegram messaging app that Russian society was “strongly united by the war and President Vladimir V. Putin’s victory in the election” before the attack.

But after the tragedy, he lamented on Sunday, Russia had turned into a “society that is split.”

Mr. Putin has done little to clear things up. On Saturday, he vowed to inflict “fair and inevitable” punishment on both the terrorists and the unknown forces behind them. Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was tied to the tragedy but stopped short of directly laying blame.

But many of Mr. Putin’s subordinates and public supporters appeared to have made up their minds about who was responsible.

Sergei A. Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst who often appears on Russian state television, wrote in a post on Telegram that Russia must work at isolating the Ukrainian leadership by “connecting the terrorist act not with ISIS, but with the Ukrainian government as much as possible.”

Russian state news outlets barely mentioned the claim of responsibility made by ISIS. United States officials have said the atrocity was the work of Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, an offshoot of the group that has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Maria V. Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on Sunday that the West was pointing at ISIS in order to shift the blame away from Ukraine.

Russia has not presented any evidence of Ukraine’s involvement in the attack. Ukrainian officials have ridiculed the Russian accusations, and U.S. officials also have said there is no indication Kyiv played any role.

“There is no, whatsoever, any evidence — and, in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually by all accounts responsible for what happened,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Sunday when asked on ABC’s “This Week” whether the United States had evidence that Ukraine was connected to the concert hall attack.

Some commentators did criticize Russian security services for failing to prevent the tragedy. On Saturday, the state news agency Tass reported , citing a source in the Russian special services, that they had received a warning from the United States but that it was “broad, without any concrete information.”

Maggie Astor

Vice President Kamala Harris was asked on ABC’s “This Week” whether the United States had any evidence to back up Vladimir Putin’s hints that Ukraine was connected to the concert hall attack. “No,” she said. “There is no, whatsoever, any evidence — and, in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually by all accounts responsible for what happened.”

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law enforcement agency, said 137 bodies have been recovered from the site of the attack, including those of three children. It said 62 victims had been identified and that genetic testing was being carried out on the remaining bodies to establish identities.

Jason Horowitz

Pope Francis offered prayers today “to the victims of the vile terrorist attack carried out the other night in Moscow,” telling the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome for Palm Sunday Mass that he hoped God would comfort and bring peace to their families and “convert the hearts of those who plan, organize and implement these unhuman acts.’”

He also prayed for all those suffering because of war: “Especially I think of martyred Ukraine, where many people find themselves without electricity because of the intense attacks against infrastructure, which, beyond causing death and suffering, bring about the risk of a human catastrophe of even greater dimensions."

Search and rescue workers are dismantling the remains of the stage at Crocus City Hall so that a giant crane can be brought in to clear debris from the collapse of the roof, the regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said on Telegram. Late last night, he said 133 bodies had been recovered from the scene of the attack, of which 50 have been identified. Another 107 injured people were in area hospitals, he said.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg

As the investigation into the Moscow attack continues, the war in Ukraine carries on. Ukraine's air force said it had shot down 43 out of 57 Russian missiles and drones launched overnight against different parts of the country. And Ukraine’s military said it had struck two large landing ships that were part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. There was no immediate comment from Russia's defense ministry.

Crocus International, the company that owns the concert hall, vowed in a statement to restore everything that was destroyed during the terrorist attack. The cost of restoring the concert hall, one of the biggest and best-equipped in Moscow, will likely exceed $100 million, real estate experts told RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency.

The complex was developed by the Azerbaijan-born billionaire Aras Agalarov, whose son, Emin, is a famous pop star. Former President Donald Trump held the Miss Universe pageant at the same complex in 2013, and world-famous performers like Eric Clapton, Dua Lipa and Sia have also performed there.

Sunday is a national day of mourning in Russia. The state media is airing footage of flags flying at half-staff on government buildings and foreign embassies, and of people bringing flowers, candles and toys to spontaneous memorials across the country.

Alex Marshall

Piknik, a longtime Russian rock band, is now at the center of a tragedy.

Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s most popular heritage rock bands, published a message to its page on Vkontakte , one of the country’s largest social media sites: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and mourn with you.”

The night before, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out concerts, accompanied by a symphony orchestra, at Crocus City Hall in suburban Moscow. But before Piknik took the stage, four gunmen entered the vast venue, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people .

The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.

“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said .

The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.

Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.

Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kukulin said, the band began performing with exciting light displays, special effects and other innovative touches. At one point in the 1990s, the band’s concerts included a “living cello” — a woman with an amplified string stretched across her. Shklyarsky would play a solo on the string.

This month, the band debuted a new song online — “ Nothing, Fear Nothing ” — with a video that showed the band performing live before huge screens featuring ever-changing animations.

Unlike some of their peers, Piknik was “never a political band,” Kukulin said, although that did not stop it from becoming entwined in politics. In the 1980s, Soviet authorities banned the group — along with many others — from using recording studios, while Soviet newspapers complained of the group’s lyrics, including a song called “Opium Smoke” that authorities saw as encouraging drug use.

In recent years, some of Russia’s most prominent rock stars have left their country, fed up with President Vladimir V. Putin’s curbs on freedom of expression, including regular crackdowns on concerts. Piknik had benefited from that exodus, Kukulin said, because the band had fewer competitors on Russia’s heritage rock circuit.

Unlike some musicians, Shklyarsky had not acted as a booster for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kukulin said. Still, Ukrainian authorities have long banned Piknik from performing in the country because the group has played concerts in occupied Crimea. In a 2016 interview , Shklyarsky said he was not concerned about the ban.

“Politics comes and goes, but life remains,” he said.

Kukulin said that among Piknik’s songs was “ To the Memory of Innocent Victims ” — a track that could be interpreted as being about those who were politically oppressed under communism. Now, Kukulin said, many fans were hearing the song in a new way, as a tribute to those who lost their lives in Friday’s attack.

Anton Troianovski

news analysis

A deadly attack shatters Putin’s promise of security to the Russian people.

Less than a week ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth term with his highest-ever share of the vote, using a stage-managed election to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control.

Just days later came a searing counterpoint: His vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.

The assault on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.

“The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”

Mr. Putin seemed blindsided by the assault. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about the mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State committed the attack.

Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the assailants had acted “just like the Nazis,” who “once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.

“Our common duty now — our comrades at the front, all citizens of the country — is to be together in one formation,” Mr. Putin said at the end of a five-minute speech, trying to conflate the fight against terrorism with his invasion of Ukraine.

The question is how much of the Russian public will buy into his argument. They might ask whether Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his conflict with the West, truly has the country’s security interests at heart — or whether he is woefully forsaking them, as many of his opponents say he is.

The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”

“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After the attack on Friday, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.

Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”

A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month .

“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”

Even as the Islamic State repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to try to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.

Olga Skabeyeva, a state television host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence had found assailants “who would look like ISIS. But this is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT television network, wrote that reports of Islamic State responsibility amounted to a “basic sleight of hand” by the American news media.

On a prime-time television talk show on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s leadership and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had surely organized the attack.

It was an effort to “undermine trust in the president,” Mr. Dugin said, and it showed regular Russians that they had no choice but to unite behind Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bombing near Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officials said was indeed authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government , but without American involvement.

U.S. officials have said there is no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said Mr. Putin’s claim that the attackers had fled toward Ukraine and intended to cross into it, with the help of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.

In recent months, Mr. Putin has appeared more confident than at any other point since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the front line, while Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western support and a shortage of troops.

Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined outcome — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.

Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, said he believed many Russians were now in “shock,” because “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”

Mr. Putin’s early years in power were marked by terrorist attacks, culminating in the Beslan school siege in 2004; he used those violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the most recent mass-casualty terrorist attack in the capital region was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 people.

Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the news media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political consequences of the concert hall attack would be limited, as long as the violence was not repeated.

“To be honest,” he said, “our society has gotten used to keeping quiet about inconvenient topics.”

Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

There have been other deadly attacks at concerts and music festivals in recent years.

The attack before a sold-out rock concert near Moscow on Friday was the latest in a series of mass killings at concerts and music festivals around the world in recent years.

During the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel last year, Hamas targeted Tribe of Nova’s Supernova Sukkot Gathering , a dance music festival in Re’im, leaving at least 360 dead , according to the Israeli authorities. Gunmen surrounded the music festival at daybreak, killing and kidnapping attendees as others fled in their cars, only to find roads blocked and the event surrounded. “It was like a shooting range,” said Hila Fakliro, who was bartending around sunrise. Around 3,000 people had come to the event, timed to the end of the harvest holiday Sukkot.

In May 2017, a suicide bombing killed 22 people and injured hundreds more at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in England. The assailant, a British citizen of Libyan descent, detonated explosives packed with nails, bolts and ball bearings moments after the performance ended, sending the crowd — filled with children and adolescent fans of the pop singer, who was then 23 — into a panic. Intelligence officials found that the bomber had previously traveled to Libya to meet with members of an Islamic State unit linked to terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, which included an assault on a concert venue.

In November 2015, 90 people were killed at the Bataclan , a Paris music venue that holds 1,500, when three men armed with assault rifles and suicide vests stormed a concert by the California rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The musicians fled the stage as gunfire broke out, and attendees tried to hide from the assailants. A standoff with the police lasted more than two hours, with concertgoers held as hostages, ending when the police entered the club. One attacker was killed; two others detonated suicide vests. “Carnage,” one attendee posted on Facebook from inside the club. “Bodies everywhere.”

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history took place at a music festival in October 2017, when a gunman fatally shot 60 people and injured hundreds more attending the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas . The assailant had stockpiled 23 firearms in a 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, opening fire from his window as Jason Aldean was onstage singing “When She Says Baby.” “It was just total chaos,” Melissa Ayala, who attended the festival with four friends, said. “People falling down and laying everywhere. We were trying to take cover and we had no idea where to go.” The F.B.I. concluded that the motive for the killings was unclear, but released files last year suggesting that the gunman, a gambler, was angry over casinos scaling back on perks. He had searched “biggest open air concert venues in USA” and reserved a hotel room overlooking the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago before settling on the Las Vegas event as his target.

The people killed at recent concerts and music festivals were commemorated earlier this year at the Grammy Awards . “Music must always be our safe space,” Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, which gives out the awards, said during the telecast. “When that’s violated, it strikes at the very core of who we are.”

Christina Goldbaum

The ISIS branch the U.S. blames for the attack has targeted the Taliban’s links with allies, including Russia.

The ISIS affiliate that American officials say was behind the deadly attack in Moscow is one of the last significant antagonists that the Taliban government faces in Afghanistan, and it has carried out repeated attacks there, including on the Russian Embassy, in recent years.

That branch of ISIS — known as the Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K — has portrayed itself as the primary rival to the Taliban, who it says have not implemented true Shariah law since seizing power in 2021. It has sought to undermine the Taliban’s relationships with regional allies and portray the government as unable to provide security in the country, experts say.

In 2022, ISIS-K carried out attacks on the Russian and Pakistani embassies in Kabul and a hotel that was home to many Chinese nationals. More recently, it has also threatened attacks against the Chinese, Indian and Iranian embassies in Afghanistan and has released a flood of anti-Russian propaganda.

It has also struck outside Afghanistan. In January, ISIS-K carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed scores and wounded hundreds of others at a memorial service for Iran’s former top general, Qassim Suleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years before.

In recent months, the Taliban’s relationship with Russia, as well as China and Iran, has warmed up. While no country has officially recognized the Taliban government, earlier this month Russia accepted a military attaché from the Taliban in Moscow, while China officially accepted a Taliban ambassador to the country. Both moves were seen as confidence-building measures with Taliban authorities.

ISIS-K has both denounced the Kremlin for its interventions in Syria and condemned the Taliban for engaging with Russian authorities decades after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Its propaganda has painted the Taliban as “betraying the history of Afghanistan and betraying their religion by making friends with their former enemies,” said Ricardo Valle, the director of research of the Khorasan Diary, a research platform based in Islamabad.

In the more than two years since they took over in Afghanistan, Taliban security forces have conducted a ruthless campaign to try to eliminate ISIS-K and have successfully prevented the group from seizing territory within Afghanistan. Last year, Taliban security forces killed at least eight ISIS-K leaders, according to American officials, and pushed many other fighters into neighboring Pakistan .

Still, ISIS-K has proved resilient and remained active across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Within Afghanistan, it has targeted Taliban security forces in hit-and-run attacks and — as it came under increasing pressure from Taliban counterterrorism operations — staged headline-grabbing attacks across the country. Just a day before the attack at the concert hall in Moscow, the group carried out a suicide bombing in Kandahar — the birthplace of the Taliban movement — sending a powerful message that even Taliban soldiers in the group’s heartland were not safe.

After the attack in Moscow, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on social media that the country “condemns in the strongest terms the recent terrorist attack in Moscow” and “considers it a blatant violation of all human standards.”

“Regional countries must take a coordinated, clear and resolute position against such incidents directed at regional de-stabilization,” he added.

Oleg Matsnev

Names of the victims are beginning to emerge.

As emergency services combed the scene of the attack on a concert hall in Moscow, details on some of the victims began to emerge from officials and local news media.

Most of those identified so far appeared to be in their 40s, and many had traveled from other parts of the country to attend the concert where Piknik, a Russian rock band formed in the late 1970s, was slated to perform on Friday night.

Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing the band, his son told local media , and had traveled solo from his home city of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent him a video of the concert hall before the attack. That was the last he heard from his father.

Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, also traveled hundreds of miles to attend the concert — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Mr. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present. He was set to turn 35 next week, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported. Both he and his wife died in the attack, the paper reported.

“Very painful and scary,” Ms. Okisheva’s colleagues wrote on a social media page for a photo studio where she worked. “The whole studio team is horrified by what happened.”

Anastasiya Volkova lost both of her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV that she had missed a call from her mother on Friday night at around the time of the attack. When she called back, there was no response, Ms. Volkova said.

As the death toll climbed to 133 people, the Moscow region’s health care ministry published a preliminary list of victims . It had 41 names; Andrey Rudnitsky was one of them.

A forward in an amateur hockey league, he turned 39 years old last week, according to his page on the league’s website. Mr. Rudnitsky’s teammates told Pro Gorod , a local news website, that he had moved to Moscow last year from Yaroslavl but planned to return home to play there. Mr. Rudnitsky had two children.

Ekaterina Novoselova, 42, was also on the list. Ms. Novoselova won a beauty pageant in 2001 in her home city of Tver, 110 miles northwest of Moscow, one of the pageant organizer’s told the local news outlet TIA . It reported that she had moved to Moscow to work as a lawyer and is survived by her husband and two children.

Some people appeared to have been named by mistake. Yevgeniya Ryumina, 38, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that she had fled the concert hall to safety. But she had lost her ID, Ms. Ryumina said, suggesting that might have led to the confusion.

This is what we know about the attack.

An attack Friday at a popular concert venue near Moscow killed 137 people, the deadliest act of terrorism the Russian capital region has seen in more than a decade.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack; American officials have attributed it to ISIS-K, a branch of the group.

Russian officials and state media have largely ignored ISIS’s claim of responsibility and instead suggested that Ukraine was behind the violence. Ukraine has denied any involvement, and American officials say there is no evidence connecting Kyiv to the attack.

Russian authorities have detained at least 11 people, including four they say were directly involved. But they have not identified the assailants or their motives, other than to say that their four main suspects are foreign citizens.

Here’s a closer look at the attack.

What happened?

The gunmen entered the Crocus City Hall building, one of the biggest entertainment complexes in the Moscow area, with capacity of more than 6,000, shortly before a sold-out rock concert was scheduled to start. Armed with automatic rifles, they began shooting.

Using explosives and flammable liquids, Russian investigators said, they set the building ablaze, causing chaos as people began to run. The fire quickly engulfed more than a third of the building, spreading smoke and causing parts of the roof to collapse. Russia’s emergency service posted a video and pictures from after the fire showing charred seating and firefighters working to remove debris.

Russian law enforcement said that people had died from gunshot wounds and poisoning from the smoke.

At least three helicopters were dispatched to extinguish the fire or to try to rescue people from the roof. The firefighters were only able to contain the fire early on Saturday; the emergency service said it was mostly extinguished by 5 a.m.

The search for survivors ended on Saturday, as details about the victims began to emerge. Many of the more than 100 people injured in the attack were in critical condition.

Where are the assailants?

Attackers were able to flee the scene. Early on Saturday, the head of Russia’s top security agency, the F.S.B., said that 11 people had been detained in the connection to the attack, including “all four terrorists directly involved.”

There were signs that Russia would try to pin blame on Ukraine, despite the claim of responsibility by the Islamic State. The F.S.B. said in a statement that the attack had been carefully planned and that the terrorists had tried to flee toward Ukraine.

A Russian lawmaker had said earlier that two terrorism suspects had been detained in the Bryansk region, southwest of Moscow.

How are Russians responding?

President Vladimir V. Putin, who claimed victory in a presidential election last weekend, did not publicly address the tragedy until Saturday afternoon. In a five-minute address to the nation, he appeared to be laying the groundwork to blame Ukraine for the attack, claiming that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for the attackers to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine.

But he did not definitively assign blame, saying that those responsible would be punished, “whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.”

The attack has punctured the sense of relative safety for Muscovites over the past decade, bringing back memories of attacks that shadowed life in the Russian capital in the 2000s.

Russia observed a national day of mourning on Sunday as questions lingered about the identities and motives of the perpetrators. Flags were lowered to half-staff at buildings across the country.

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Why students choose Russia as their travel destination

No comments · Posted by Alex Smirnov in Travel

If you are looking for something different but unique and are not satisfied by the traditional offer of tourist destinations, try looking eastward for a moment. We are not talking about the Far East but just east of Europe and a little further than better-known destinations like Venice or Berlin. We invite you to visit Russia and discover interesting facts about Russia that make this country so special.

Today, Russian tourism is on a rise for a variety of reasons, including great food, cultural heritage, and beautiful cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg. Traveling is supposed to be about exploring new things or meeting new people and this country is a tourist gem waiting to be discovered.

1. Cultural Heritage

Russia might be a part of Europe but for most westerners, it is still a mysterious country with a unique mentality that makes them curious. People in Russia seem like warm, emotional souls who like drinking vodka and eating caviar for breakfast which is not far from the truth. This little prejudice doesn’t really summarize their cultural heritage which is vast and colorful.

We could write essays and college papers about Hermitage or Moscow’s Metro which is like a museum in the open. The city of St. Petersburg looks like the capital of some North Pole Kingdom with its castles, boulevards, and winter palaces. Maintaining the beauty of cultural monuments is taken very seriously so each tourist will enjoy a display of east-European architecture and design. We warmly recommend visiting sites like:

* Hermitage Museum * Red Square in Moscow * The Peterhof Palace * Mariinsky Theatre * Saint Isaac’s Cathedral

2. Beautiful Nature

Just like Russian literature, everything in this country comes in big portions and inspires topics and interesting conversations. Huge cities, enormous landscapes, or large meals are just some examples, but traveling is how you get to know a country, not by reading essays or college papers. The most popular thing that students write in their essays on travelling through Russia is it’s frighteningly vast natural wildlife scenery. There are almost fifty national parks across this whole country so take your pick and enjoy connecting with mother nature. One will get plenty of topic ideas to inspire him If he wishes to write an essay after such a mesmerizing trip.

Some of the most beautiful National Parks are:

* Losiny Ostrov * Bashkiriya * Kenozersky * Kalevalsky * Chavash Varmane

3. Education Opportunities

While native Russian might be a little difficult to learn, for those who conquer its basics, there are amazing opportunities to study in Russian college or university. Know that Russia’s education system is quite liberal so if you wondered does Russia have free college, the answer is affirmative. Many exchange student programs are available for those who show interest to study here.

This could be a unique chance to exchange cultural capital and values while reaching your educational goals. Studying in a Russian college is not so different in terms of taking classes and other obligations like writing research papers on various topics. Having paper due assignments might come less often because Russians prefer oral examination or open discussion.

Some of the Top Universities to check out:

* Tomsk Polytechnic University * MISIS University of Science and Technology * Moscow Engineering Physics Institute * HSE University of Economics

4. Having Fun Russian Style

After all those essays, topic ideas, and college papers it is time to have some proper fun. Join your new friends as they take you through local taverns, try domestic cuisine, plus a few shots of national drinks. There are so many examples of traditional hospitality that one will experience on every corner, as he discovers some fabulous wonders of this great country. If one could write summaries about his Russian experience it would definitely include accounts of long nights in Moscow’s inns and nightclubs.

Maybe one of these:

* Propaganda * Pravda Club * Gipsy * City Pub Crawl

These are the Russia facts, but we encourage travelers to explore uncharted territories by hanging out with local people thus learning about their culture and customs. That is the best way to truly understand the heart of its people. Changing scenery is always good for young students as it signals a fresh start in their lives. Maybe visiting this country will refresh your spirit or inspire you to achieve all your educational goals and dreams.

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You might also like:

Boat trip along the canals of St. Petersburg

World Famous Literary Stories From Russia With Catchy Titles

Top Reasons You Have to Study Medicine in Russia >>

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9 Things to See in Moscow's Red Square

Sir Francis Canker/Getty Images

In most cases, you'll be entering Red Square from the north, passing landmarks such as the Bolshoi Theatre and Duma parliament building as you make your way southward. Although you don't necessarily have to pass through the Voskresensky (or Resurrection in English) Gates in order to gain access to the square these days, they definitely provide a sense of arrival, to say nothing of the way their left arch frame's St. Basil's Cathedral if you look from just the right angle.

An interesting fact is that while a gate of some kind has stood here since the mid-16th century, the one you currently see wasn't built until 1994, having been destroyed in 1931 so that tanks could enter and exit Red Square during military parades.

St. Basil's Cathedral

TripSavvy / Christopher Larson

Few sights are as iconic not only of Moscow and Red Square but indeed of Russia than St. Basil's Cathedral, whose colorful, onion-shaped domes are a symbol of the country around the world. Officially known as the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, this church has stood since 1561, which is quite miraculous when you consider all the turbulent history that has transpired since then.

Among other things, religion was severely prohibited during the Soviet period , which led some to believe that this emblem of the Russian Orthodox church might not withstand the tenure of the USSR.

An interesting fact is that St. Basil's is the so-called "Kilometer Zero" of Russia; all of Moscow's main roads (which can take you anywhere in Russia) begin at the exits to Red Square. In this way, St. Basil's iconic status also has an extremely tangible element.

The Kremlin

TripSavvy / Christopher Larson

When you think of The Kremlin, it's unlikely that positive images enter your mind. The fact that simply saying the word "Kremlin" is too vague a descriptor (most Russian cities have their own Kremlin complexes; you should say "Moscow Kremlin") notwithstanding, this misunderstood place is incredibly beautiful, even if you don't like the policy that comes out of it.

Senate Square

In spite of its name, which refers to the role the building that rises above the square played during Imperial Russia, Senate Square is actually home to Russia's presidential administration, currently helmed by Vladimir Putin. In order to see where Russia's legislature operates from, walk just outside Red Square to the Duma parliament building.

Dormition Cathedral

Dating back to the year 1479, the gold-domed Dormition Cathedral pays homage to an Orthodox religious feast that commemorates the death of the Virgin Mary . As is the case with St. Basil's, it is curious that such a conspicuously religious structure was able to survive through the Soviet period.

Armoury Chamber

Though it takes its name from the fact that it housed Russia's royal arsenal when it was built in the 16th century, the most notable resident of the Kremlin's Armoury Chamber today is the Russian Diamond Fund.

Notable Kremlin Towers

Robert Schrader

The interior of the Moscow Kremlin is more beautiful and inviting than you'd expect, but the walls and towers that rise around it better live up to the intimidation with which the complex is associated.

Borovitskaya Tower

Named to commemorate the dense forest that once stood atop the mount where it's built, this tower is extremely picturesque. Built in the late 15th century, it's visible from most places in the square, and also as you walk along the Moskva River.

Nikolskaya Tower

Also built in the year 1491, this tower currently suffered destruction at the hands of Napoleon's army in the 19th century. What you see now is the result of an 1816 re-design and renovation, though artillery fire during the Russian Revolution also caused superficial damage to the tower, named to honor St. Nikolas of Mozhaysk , so it's difficult to know which elements of it are original.

Spasskaya Tower

Known in English as the "Savior's Tower," this iconic, star-topped tower is perhaps the best-known of all the Kremlin's towers. Built in 1491 like the other two towers on this list, it's certainly the most photographed. As a result of its proximity to St. Basil's, it often makes its way into tourists' pictures.

Mausoleum of Lenin

Just as it's strange to learn how many religious monuments survived through the Soviet period, it's a bit odd to think that Lenin's preserved body still sits in a mausoleum just beneath the walls of the Kremlin on Red Square, given the lack of consensus about the ultimate impact of his Revolution, even in Russia.

It's not guaranteed that you'll be able to see the body (which, believe it or not, seems to be improving with age ) when you go, and if you do you will likely have to wait in line, but even strolling past the outside of the Lenin Mausoleum, flanked by stone-faced guards that almost look like statues, illuminates the gravity of his body still being here.

GUM Shopping Center

You might cringe, at least initially, when you realize that one of the most iconic stops on a tour of Red Square is a department store—until you see said department store, that is. Built in 1893 and known during Soviet times as the State Department Store, GUM ( Glávnyj Universáľnyj Magazín or Main Universal Store in English) hearkens back to the grandeur of the late 19th century, both seen from the outside (especially, when lit up at night) and the interior, which might have you feeling like you're further west in Europe.

A trip inside GUM is a particularly good idea during winter, when frigid temperatures outside will have you savoring the heat, the quality of souvenirs, confections and other goods sold inside notwithstanding. Also, make sure not to confuse GUM with CDM, which sits near the Bolshoi Theatre, even though both are stunning and iconic in their own right.

State Historical Museum

The Russian State Historical Museum is located near Voskresensky Gates, though you should wait until after you've seen the first few attractions of Red Square and the Kremlin to head back there and go inside. To be sure, as you pass by its facade (whose late-19th century grandeur somewhat obscures that fact that it's currently a museum accessible to the public) you might not even think to try and gain entry.

Once inside the museum, you can plan to spend at least a couple of hours, given that artifacts here date back to the very beginning of the Russian state in the ninth century. As is the case with GUM, this will be a particularly alluring prospect if you visit in winter, when Moscow is arguably at its most beautiful, but certainly at its least tolerable.

Minin-Pozharsky Monument

It's somewhat easy to disregard this monument, which pays homage to the two Russian princes who ended the so-called "Time of Troubles" in the mid-16th century, during which Polish-Lithuanian forces occupied Russia, among other awful things including a famine. That's because the statue currently sits just at the base of St. Basil's Cathedral, which makes it very difficult to photograph or even see without being overwhelmed by that much more famous edifice.

Though the statue originally sat at the very center of Red Square, it came to be an obstacle to the movement of tanks during the Soviet period, much like the Voskresensky Gates. As a result, authorities moved it during that time, and it's stayed where you currently find it ever since.

Kazan Cathedral

Taken by itself, the smokey-pink Kazan Cathedral is an architectural marvel; originally built in the 17th century, the church you find here today, located just north of the GUM department store, dates back only to 1993.

Unfortunately, since it sits not only in the shadow of GUM, but also in the shadow St. Basil's and the Towers of the Kremlin, it's easy to miss entirely if you aren't looking. As a result, you might wait until you've seen just about everything else in Red Square before coming here to take photos, and to appreciate the understated beauty of this oft-overlooked cathedral.

Moskva River

As you head south from St. Basil's Cathedral to exit Red Square, make sure to walk onto Bolshoy Moskvoretskiy Bridge, which crosses the Moskva River. If you look due north, you can get an excellent shot of the church framed, on the left, by the towers of the Kremlin. Directing your gaze a bit to the west allows you to see the skyscrapers of Moscow City as they rise above the Kremlin's walls.

Walking westward along the riverbank is also a worthwhile excursion, for the views it provides of Red Square and the Kremlin, as well as the fact that doing so takes you to other iconic Moscow attractions, including Gorky Park and the Pushkin Museum. The views you enjoy from the river and the bridge are particularly stunning at night, though you should make sure you bring a tripod if you want to get a clear picture, given how strong winds over and near the river can be.

Moscow - Russian Rivers and Waterways Port of Call

Moscow Metro: The Complete Guide

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The Impressive Castles of Eastern Europe

St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow: Planning Your Visit

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Top 12 Things to Do in Kazan, Russia

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The Top 12 Things to Do in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

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