The successful career of a future seafarer begins with the first classes at the academy. But the modern world presents severe challenges to educators. In difficult working conditions, teachers and students find ways to improve the quality of the educational process, to make it more productive and to obtain positive results.

The great example of this is the involvement of senior students, who have considerable experience working on ships, to cooperate and communicate with junior students who have just begun to gain proficiency in this field. This joint activity takes place under the slogan “Bridging academic and practical gaps” and is aimed at increasing students motivation; familiarizing with the features of the future profession; developing responsibility and conscious attitude to requirements, duties, tasks during onboard practice; learning how to apply acquired theoretical knowledge and skills, analyzing real situations of everyday work on the ship; developing critical thinking; preparing for interviews at crewing companies.

On Friday, December 8, students of group 121-2 had a lesson conducted by their teachers Larysa Lipshyts and Svitlana Barsuk and a student of Master Degree course, 2/O Andrii Protsenko. The lesson topic was MARPOL Regulations. To show how the regulations can be applied to the mariners’ everyday activities aboard ship, Andrii prepared an interactive presentation and shared his sea-going experience with the students. They used the opportunity to demonstrate their skills developed at previous lessons in a live discussion. As a result, all the participants were satisfied with such approach and decided to have more lessons with marine specialists.