MSSU signs memorandum with Ukraine university

In January Missouri Southern signed a memorandum of understanding to partner with Odessa National Maritime University in Odessa, Ukraine. According to the Southern’s contact for the partnership, assistant professor of international business, Dr. Chris Moos, the Odessa university signed the memorandum in December with Southern signing two weeks ago.

According to Moos, the Odessa university is not maritime in the sense of being a naval or military school but instead teaches the management of ports and the ships that use them.

“If you think about it we teach people how to manage organizations that are always at the same address,” Moos said. “A ship has to pay bills, buy supplies, pay port services and exchange currencies. “It’s a business that is all the time moving and that is a different attribute of management and dovetails nicely with our international business management program here.”

Dr. Moos’ wife is a graduate of the university in Ukraine and so they both know several people there.

That helped to lay the groundwork for the partnership. Additionally, last year, Southern was invited to participate in the Ukraine National Port Management Competition in which Moos took a group of students to the competition where the group took first case analysis. Moos said it was at this competition that the idea of partnership started.

“The initial memorandum of understanding is for a period of two years,” Moos said. “What it is basically saying is that we agree for a period of two years to begin working together to see how we can dovetail things together.”

The idea is, in the future, to have faculty exchanges potentially working together on research projects and student exchanges between the two, Moos said.

Moos said that this is another partnership agreement for Southern which already has partnership agreements with other universities.

“I don’t imagine student exchange will be a large amount of students per year, here to there. I think we can look for a lot of demand to come from there to here,” Moos said.  

Moos said that the two universities are similar in several ways. “They have about 5,500 students. They have a variety of majors, minimal dormitory housing, located in a central part of the city,” he said.