Recently the results of the All-Russian contest “Golden Names of Higher School” from the Interregional Public Organization “League of Higher School Teachers” were announced. Among its winners in the nomination “For devotion to the profession and continuation of traditions of the Russian higher school” was Dmitry Shurygin, Professor of the Department of Automation of Production Processes of Ƶ, Candidate of Technical Sciences, who told about his path in teaching.

Dmitry Shurygin has been working at the Department of Automation of Production Processes of Ƶ since 1967. The professor admits that he had pedagogical inclinations even in his school years, when he studied at the Second St. Petersburg Gymnasium.
I studied with pleasure and willingly helped my classmates. If they had any problems with understanding complex problems, I managed to explain everything simply and clearly, and everyone was very satisfied. I also studied quite successfully, received Stalin's scholarship and graduated from school with a gold medal, thanks to which the road to any institute without exams was open to me.
After school he entered the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute (now St. Petersburg State University of Shipbuilding) at the design faculty, where he worked on torpedoes and their control. According to Dmitry Alekseevich, he studied at the Institute not only with pleasure, but even with excitement, passing the sessions ahead of time exclusively with “excellent”. After receiving his diploma with honors, he got a job as a designer of cruise missile autopilots at an industrial enterprise.
At that time, I had incredibly interesting tasks in front of me, and I was often involved in testing. On this job I learned two very important things. The first is the study of the dynamics of complex systems, because cruise missiles are very complex systems, in terms of controlling them. The second is mathematical modeling. At that time there were no computers yet, and we worked on a computer called “Model 1”. It occupied the area of almost a whole gymnasium. And everything I liked in this work, except its secrecy, which excluded almost any communication, and I am a companionable person. Then I unexpectedly saw an announcement that the Leningrad Institute of Textile and Light Industry named after S. M. Kirov. S. M. Kirov Leningrad Institute of Textile and Light Industry (now SPbGUPTD) required a teacher at the Department of Automation of Production Processes. I thought: “This is just what we need!”

So Dmitry Alekseevich began teaching the theory of automatic control at the University of Industrial Technology and Design.
At the department I work with unchanging pleasure. Over the years, I have realized that it is not necessary to cram students with any information, it is not necessary to teach them by force. I always talk to them, share my own experience, including those years when I was engaged in rocket technology. At lectures, I always visually grop the audience in search of attentive eyes and work for those eyes. It's very inspiring. I am also sure that a good teacher should be interesting to students, so he should have a busy life. I used to be fond of foreign languages: German, English, French, Polish. Now I am saturated with exhibitions and music, I regularly go to the Philharmonic.
Today the list of scientific and educational and methodological works of the professor includes 188 publications: 124 scientific articles, 4 author's certificates, 14 teaching aids, 45 methodical instructions. Under his scientific guidance, eight dissertations for the degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences were successfully defended.
Since a long time ago, I really love the song sung by Leonid Osipovich Utesov. It has these words:
The song helps us to build and live, It, as a friend, and calls, and leads, And the one who with a song walks through life, That never and nowhere will be lost!
And I must confess that I always sang these lines when I went to take exams. And, probably, it helped, because the results were always excellent. Now I've slightly changed the ending: “And he who walks through life with a smile will never be lost anywhere.