Shekhovtsov Sergii Olegovych

I was born in the frosty and snowy evening of April 12, 1987, in the nice family of Shekhovtsova Helen Evgenievna and Shekhovtsov Oleg Anatolievich. According to the evidences of the witnesses, I learned to read quite early, and approached this affair quite seriously. Long before school I advanced in studying the fundamentals of nuclear physics and sky mechanics and read a children’s encyclopedia devoted to these aspects.

But when I was five, I found the book “Professor Fortran’s Encyclopedia” by A.V. Zaretskiy and A.V. Trukhanov, in which ‘the authors introduce the pupils of primary school to the world of computers in a captivating and interesting way’. After this I was doomed to become a programmer.

When I was seven, I entered the school #123. At that time my parents brought me to learn painting. And at the same time I got my first computer — “Parus” (ZX-Spectrum). I didn’t take much interest in painting, but I got along well with the computer — it was able to do such a magnificent thing as downloading programmes from a cassette (yes, from an ordinary audio cassette). Certainly, I also played with it. But I also found the interpreter of Basic on that “Parus” and several attempts were made if not to program, at least to understand the principle of its work.

This machine stood a couple of years in our house, and then my father found an XT somewhere, which became my favourite thing as well.

For you not to think that computer absorbed all my consciousness, I should tell you that I was getting only excellent marks at school and particularly appreciated mathematics and physics (that is not surprising). I took part in contests in these subjects, but didn’t succeed very much. In the seventh and eighth forms I was going in for swimming and even got the third youth grade. By the way, I should also mention that at that period my parents bought me my third serious computer — Celeron-700.

After my eighth form I didn’t continue my school study, but passed tests and was accepted as a student of Donetsk technical college. It was way more difficult to study, because teachers demanded much more from us, than from the pupils of the same age, who studied at school. But I should express my gratitude to my teachers of mathematics, physics, biology and history. They succeeded not only to arouse my interest in these disciplines, but also to bring me up as a person who approaches tasks with responsibility and never gives up.

Simultaneously with college studies I took additional lessons of mathematics. They helped me a lot to pass the entrance ratings and become a student of DonNTU. Since I was accepted to a first year of study before the examination, getting a silver medal after studying at a college didn’t influence anything except my self-estimation.

By the way, I should admit, that I wrote my first, rather serious for that time, programmes being a college student — these were the counterparts of the games “Sapper”, “Lines”, “Sokoban”.

I think, I don’t need to explain why I chose this speciality. As for the choice of high school, a question did not even stand — it was decided somehow a priori, that I will apply for a study in DonNTU. So, my university studies began on September 1, 2004. We calculated at once, that the most effective approach to teaching of programing are numerous errors in method guides, correcting which makes it easier to understand the essence of the programmes. This method was widely applied by our teachers, but we coped with this. Studying was difficult, interesting, but not long. By will of fate one beautiful July evening an accident happened which made me take an academic vacation for a year. Because, you know, it’s difficult to attend classes with your feet broken.

In December I could walk around more or less freely, and used my recovery to go to the university and meet my new group. I can not say that I liked it so much, but I just had no choice. Later it appeared, that the first opinion was erroneous — I got accustomed with my group quickly, pretty well and without difficulties.

By the time of the beginning of academic year I didn’t want to idle, therefore I worked as a system administrator in “StroyAktiv” for a couple of months, and got very valuable experience in taming computers.

The second year was especially hard for me. Since I quite got out of the habit to study during a year, after the academic vacation my first session was extremely difficult to pass. Further on I succeeded to return on a way true and to improve the educational results considerably. These efforts did were helpful for me and after passing a bachelor examination with “excellent”, I was recommended to a master’s study on a budget basis. There I’ve been studying for now on, combining studies with work in the firm of "Soft Xpansion" 3D С++ programmer.

Кostyukova Natalia Stepanovna is my research supervisor. The choice fell on her not only because she is a remarkable teacher and wonderful person, but also because the topic she is working at — image processing — is of great interest for me. It was during my third year that I took interest in this subject, writing my research on creation of 3D graphics editor. Choice of the topic is not casual either — the content-dependent looping is a new perspective technology now and it would be interesting for me to explore the possibilities of this algorithm.

In the end I’d like to express my gratitude to Chernyshova Alla Viktorovna, who teaches us since the second year and thanks to who I learned to hand over my research works in time.=)

As for my plans for the future I have some, but now as they’re still far from realization, I do not think that they should be divulged. Naturally, there is aspiration to quarry growth, I think that is not groundless. In general, I’d like to visit different parts of the world and try some extreme kinds of sport.