WSU Student Will Study Architecture In Vladivostok

Harley Cowan’s family says he could win a Vladimir Lenin look-alike contest with his glasses, goatee and shaved scalp, but Russians still seem to be able to peg him as an American.

Cowan, 23, a Washington State University architecture student, may be the first undergraduate from this country to attend the Far Eastern State Technical University.

The school is in Vladivostok on Russia’s southeastern tip, on the coast of the Sea of Japan. The site was closed to Americans when it was the base of the former Soviet Union’s Pacific fleet.

Cowan’s nine-month exchange program, arranged through the American Collegiate Consortium, begins in September. He’ll live in a dormitory with a Russian roommate.

“The biggest reason for doing it is for a job, naturally,” Cowan said. “In Russia, the market is opening up quite a bit to the West. A number of firms are exploring doing business over there.”

He is pursuing a Russian minor at WSU, and hopes his language skills will make him an attractive potential employee.

WSU’s Russian Department has a bond with the intensive-language program at the Vladivostok school. A few years ago, some of its Russian architecture professors visited WSU.

Cowan visited Vladivostok earlier this summer and enrolled in a language and culture course. Without it, he wouldn’t have been able to follow a senior college course lecture on architecture, he said.

While there, he’ll have to get comfortable with the metric system. And he’ll be writing his thesis in Russian, with an English translation for professors on the Pullman campus, Cowan said.

He hasn’t decided on a project topic but is most interested in public infrastructures such as streets and parks.

Total costs for the trip are about $12,000, including tuition. WSU’s architecture school has provided $1,000 in grants, including $500 from Yost, Grube, Hall Architecture, a Portland firm. Cowan said his nationality apparently is obvious despite the family jokes about his looking like Lenin.

When he asked a Russian woman showing him around Vladivostok this summer how everyone spotted him as a visitor, she said: “You look American.”

“Even if I was dressed like a Russian, I got picked out. I still haven’t figured it out,” Cowan said.