(4.5.2000 - 3.3.2022, Kharkiv)
Yulia Zdanowska is a Ukrainian girl who was exceptionally smart, ambitious, and patriotic.
She was always a genius, especially when the problem was to come up with something new and creative. Every student and teacher who has met her remembers that very well.
Three times she was a prize winner of both Ukrainian National olympiad in Mathematics and in Informatics. There are not so many people who could stand this pressure and prepare and perform well at both competitions simultaneously. Moreover, she had a silver medal at European Girl’s Mathematical Olympiad and participated in the selection for International Olympiad in Informatics.
In fact, her full potential was much more than her official achievements since she had often overlooked the solutions to the easiest problems. Once there was a funny case when everybody at the olympiad had a score 7 7 0 0 (for each problem respectively), meaning that no one had the slightest idea how to solve the third and the fourth problem. Yulia has also scored 14 but her score was 0 0 7 7 and she went out complaining about the first problem, even though later she realised she could have solved it in less than 5 mins. At the same olympiad, she went to appeal her result one point down because she had it by a grader’s mistake (later she was awarded with prize headphones “for fair play” and she was very proud of it). Anyway, the competitions didn't matter to her that much.
She could have easily become a really good programmer at a tech giant if she wanted — she worked at Samsung for several months but dropped it because she wanted to have enough time for teaching children and for studying at university. Or create a new powerful algorithm — after studying so many of them when preparing for programming contests (also, she had the absolute first place at the Computer Science Olympiad in Kyiv in 2017, where participants had to come up with the most effective algorithm and prove/justify it). Or become a maths researcher — she visited professor Andrii Bondarenko in Norway and Spain where they read maths papers and discussed her potential research direction.
However, her childhood dream was to teach kids and revolutionize education. She was teaching maths and programming in many places since she was 16. After finishing her Bachelor's last year, she went to teach in a small village since she believed there were already enough smart teachers in the large cities.
She had always been on the same wavelength with kids. She literally never separated work and life when it comes to classes. For her, classes WERE the life itself and in addition to that, she spent a lot of free time preparing for them.
Her educational projects
In 2021 she got her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Mathematics at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University (after defending her thesis on "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning”, related to AI). Her university teachers loved her. A professor from her university wrote about her: «My heart is breaking, for tonight was killed Yulia Zdanowska, my former (everything is former for her now) student, summer school colleague, rock-climbing fellow». A friend of another professor wrote about him: «I found this out from the mathematician in Trondheim who had worked with Julia. He was literally crying. Swearing and crying». The university has published a post starting with «Our talented girl…» and ending with «We will never forgive».
From Yulia’s mother's recent post on Facebook: «When she was getting the diploma of the Bachelor's degree in Computer Mathematics at Kyiv National University, the teachers wished her to become a Harvard professor. She has replied: "I don't care about being a professor or going to Harvard. I will consider becoming the Minister of Education in Ukraine, though"». It would never be a question of whether she would succeed to get there or whether she’d become a good minister. It would depend only on whether she would want to get involved in politics and spend her time on it. And she was ready to do it in order to change her country.
Even more than for being a prodigy, she was known for speaking out against any injustice or inconvenience. At school everybody remembered her for arguing with teachers, classmates, school administration who put her classmate an unfair grade, shouted at someone while playing football or wanted to implement a useless rule of taking off her coat when it was cold inside the classroom. Outside of school, there were even more such cases.
From Andrii Nikolaiev, her colleague and friend: «I would describe her as a full of initiative and hard-working person, as a friend — active, joyful, easy-going. Even after full working day one could always expect to go to play board games with Yulia or do sports or chat, she never got tired. Well, or did get in the most sudden moment 🙂»
She had the heart of a child and treated everything with openness and sincerity. Running wildly into the snow after seeing that nobody has stepped on it yet and throwing shoes aside in summer immediately after reaching the grass… She considered the world around her just a huge playground, where she could either discover something new (such as a new technological feature on mobile) or make something old more fun and brightful (e.g. by adding food colouring into pasta she cooked).
In 2014 Yulia’s parents were one of the people who established the volunteer organzation “Station Kharkiv” which helped refugees from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea. It had started with volunteers meeting refugees at the railway station (with board “Kharkiv station”, that’s how their name originated) and became a UNHCR-supported organisation running a lot of projects of different scales. Yulia’s mother is still CEO of “Station Kharkiv” which has now adjusted for the current militaty and humanitarian needs of the country. Yulia has been involved in the project too, from looking after kids when their mothers attended courses of increasing their work qualification to teaching programming to giving career advice.
Yulia chose not to die while hiding at home in the basement. Instead, she died as a hero. From her colleague at “Teach for Ukraine”: «The last message I received from her was: "Thank you, but I am staying in Kharkiv until we win".»