A little about MBA life

Sooo, grad school is busy now.  It's exhausting, overwhelming, but good.  I wrote for the Kelley Women blog here and thought you might like to see it to get a bit of an idea about what I'm doing now that I don't ever write (either here or in reply to any correspondence you might have sent-sorry).
Also, it says my friend and I wrote it.  I wrote it and she edited it, so that's why it is written with a singular pronoun.  We haven't become one person...yet.  

Another New Chapter

A quick update on my life...this ends the travel bit for now as I embark upon learning a new culture:business.

This summer I started rereading “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” by Donald Miller.  I read it the first time in that terrible period when I came home from Russia and felt like my awesome life had suddenly stopped and I didn’t know how to get it started again.  It really resonated, because the book’s about your life as a story, and in your life, to make a good life, like a good story, you need a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.  I’m not sure why I decided to reread it, but I brought it to Georgia.  At first, I read about a chapter a day (they’re short).  Then, after a few weeks, when the book was starting to tell me I had to stop reading and start living, I stopped reading. 

 

This encapsulates Georgia on so many levels

I wanted to ease into the comfortable routine of class, homework, watching the Turkish soap opera with my host family, reading some fiction, and then crashing before doing it all over again.  I mixed it up with some friends, but the workload was enough that I could easily ignore all the rest Tbilisi had to offer.

This summer, I really realized how beautiful Tbilisi really is.

The weeks went by too quickly.  I knew they would.  My bucket list is far from complete.  Time with friends was too short.  But, I realize, in those eight weeks, my story entered a new chapter.  I climbed a mountain with a friend after two other attempts went wrong.  I had conversations that stayed in Georgian.  I became part of a family in Tbilisi.  I finally made it Shatili, the place at the top of my bucket list.  I laughed with friends a lot.  I discovered new parts of Tbilisi I didn’t even know. I spent two months indulging my love of languages.  I fell more in love with Georgia and Tbilisi.

My host sister gave me a special tour of the Art Academy, with this gorgeous lobby.

It all ended too quickly and the next chapter began immediately, before I had a chance to recover from the jet lag.  Somehow, I managed to make friends even when I’m pretty sure every sentence didn’t make sense those first days.  In the last week, I’ve made a few friends that I think will see me through my MBA.  I’ve met a lot of fascinating people.  I’ve gotten to make friends with several international students.   

At the same time, watching all these people move and start over, I realize that I’ve done this for the last two years.  It gives me a leg up, but it also makes me a little tired.  As much as I love going and moving and trying something new, I miss having friends who know me enough to call me out when necessary, who really know me.  I’m starting to realize that while I’m making friends all over the globe, I need quality time in one location to develop those deep friendships.  I hope I make them in the next two years, since the sheer quantity of forced socialization means I’ll be doing a lot of “networking”.  

Even though I’ve lived in Bloomington for a year, it’s still an entirely new experience.  My program can consume my entire life.  But, after this, I’ve finally got to grow up and maybe even settle in one place, so for now, I’m going to try to enjoy it.  I see a lot of conflict (forcing myself out of my comfort zone is going to become a daily occurrence), so I’m hoping my character grows and gets whatever I’m seeking from the MBA.  For starters, a clarification of what exactly that is would be nice…

Now that I'm done writing about Khrushchev and the Georgian economy...

And, it happened.  I knew the time would come when I would fail to keep up with the blog.  This semester somehow got away from me.  By the time winter was over, papers were calling my name.  I still managed to have a good semester.  Instead of working on papers for Spring Break, my mom, best friend, and I ventured to San Francisco.  Having never ventured to the West Coast, I loved it.  I don’t think I could handle the high prices and hills for any length of time, but the city was a blast to visit for a few days.  The weather also cooperated marvelously, so instead of gross Indiana weather, we got a week of relative sun and light jackets.   

Then I went back to school and found out I’d be writing more papers than I thought, so life became very narrow: read, write, and get your homework done.  I also decided not to go on the program I was set on this summer.  Instead of going to Russia, I decided to go to Georgia.  I leave in a few weeks and am looking forward to a summer in Tbilisi-getting to see old friends, being back in a beautiful country, and do some more exploring.

I finished year 1 of grad school well, but that was the easy year.  In August I start the MBA program and enter a different world.  Part of me can’t wait, the other part wonders how I’ll still be able to have conversations about Putin and Stalin and Misha on a regular basis.  At least I’ll have friends who won’t shudder when I talk about TFP or privatization.

A few weeks before school got out, the business school had an admit weekend, a teaser of how different life is about to become.  It was a bit jarring to realize that the two programs on the same campus could treat everything so differently.  It’s also a relief to be entering a program where people actually (and actively) care about me getting a great job I enjoy once I finish this degree.  As much as I love what I’ve learned this year, I won’t be sad to say goodbye to academia in 2 years.

But, I don’t have to grow up just yet.  In the weeks since school got over, I moved, again.  I’ve managed to stay in one place for longer than a year only once since I turned 18, so I really should be better at this moving thing than I am.  At least this time I got movers, so the process was much easier, and moving every year makes me consistently reevaluate if I need things or not.  After that, I went home to visit my parents and have ended up working at my mom’s work for more days than I anticipated.  It’s been a good break from the cerebral world of Bloomington.  Friendly smiles, happy small talk, and small town speech has been a breath of fresh air, as well as entertainment for the linguistic side of my brain.  The days I leave the bakery to be outside are reminders of why I’m in school to get a desk job so I don’t have to perform manual labor in the future.

In the midst of a month off that’s fleeing all too fast, I got a quick trip in to see my grandmother in Vero Beach.  I got to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in too long.  In thinking about B-school, I’ve thought about where I want to work when I graduate.  I’m pretty flexible, but the more I walked along that beach and swam in the waves, the more the Atlantic seaboard started appealing more and more.  The ocean is my happy place.  It’s just good for the soul.

Getting to visit with my grandmother was also wonderful.  It’s one more experience in a long line the last few years where I realize that my role is changing.  I’m no longer the child, tagging along while others make all the decisions, but a real adult.  This was the first time I had ever spent any real time just me and my grandmother.  It was quite lovely, and the trip was far too short. 

The visit was another instance of where I was hit by how places mean so much, even for one who sometimes feels like a vagrant.   As I drove to St. Louis, my first sight of the Arch brought a smile to my face, as it has every time I’ve seen it since I was a girl, driving to visit my grandparents, when the Arch signaled the journey was almost over.  I ended up needing to drive through my old neighborhood on Monday.  I hadn’t been by in a couple years, so I was pleased when I remembered where the street we needed was but also felt strange seeing our old house, now clearly inhabited by another family.  Even after two years away, many places in St. Louis still feel so familiar.  In the airport on my way to Florida, I caught a glimpse of one of the few restaurants before security and suddenly remembered drinking an overpriced chai tea latte there with my parents, waiting to start the journey that would take me to Tbilisi. Now I’m a few weeks away from making a similar journey.  I’m looking forward to going to Georgia for so many reasons, but I also am trying to temper my excitement.  Once again, I’ll be seeing an old familiar place with new experiences behind me.  Many of the friends who made my year in Georgia so wonderful are now far away, or will only be around for a brief period of time.  I’ll be with a new host family, spending lots of time studying, and living in Tbilisi instead of my lovely mountain village.

  I can go back to Georgia, but I can’t really go back, not to the year I had, the life I knew then.  It’s better for me, but I have so many magical memories of Georgia, that I know I’ll miss certain faces and places when I return.  While several things have changed, I’m so pleased that one of the things I’ve missed most will come true.  Within a week of arriving, I will get to sit in my favorite restaurant drinking cheap wine by the liter with two of my favorite people, chatting away the hours like we used to.  The experience was one I repeated many times and encompasses so many parts of why I loved my year in Georgia so much.  I’m hoping this summer it will be a kick-off to a new source of adventures, friends, experiences, and stories for the blog.

Reasons I Should Be Reconsidering This MA

1.       I actually asked to write a paper.  I don't have to write any other papers this semester and I'm hoping the topic will springboard into my master's thesis...but, still, in April, I"ll be writing 20 pages that I know I don't really have to write.

2.       My friends and I go to bars to do things like play board games and discuss Stalin.

3.       My Cold War history class is making me think this degree is good preparation for becoming dictator of a dystopia.

4.       My Soviet-type Economies in Transition class has inspired me to create a game where you try to create an effective centrally planned economy.  Think “Socialist Monopoly”.

5.       My friends and I hit upon a goldmine of an idea to open up a clothing shop of period English clothing, so we can dress like the characters in Jane Austen novels and the residents of Downton Abbey.

6.       Meeting people like the ambassador of Estonia only makes me want to travel even more.  Sadly, Bloomington lacks an international airport.

7.       Did I mention I have a new passport?  I got the big version so I have lots of pages that are crisp and new, just waiting to be filled.  Not that it's killing me.  Not that I've looked up prices for flights to Turkey for Spring Break.  Not that I'm applying for a summer program in Russia.

All in all, semester 2 is starting out just fine, all things considered.

Being Sick is Easier in America

I'm not sure how much I emphasized it, but basically last winter I was sick from the first week in November until I went home and went to the doctor right before Christmas.  Most of spring also involved more respiratory infection fun.  I did have health insurance but with a hospital that looked like it should belong in a movie about a war-torn country and good medical care far away in Tbilisi, I decided it was best not to go to the doctor.  I ran through the OTC meds I had brought and a friend gave me fairly quickly and after that just learned to suck it up and drink lots of tea.  It got old quickly, but I realized that teaching small children in a country where washing your hands and other basics of public health were iffy meant that I was just going to have to get used to being sick.  (OK, to be fair, there are cold meds in Georgia, but basically any form of healthcare in Georgia terrified me and seemed worse than simply letting my immune system do its duty.)

Apparently I did.  When I got sick earlier this semester, it took 2 weeks and obvious sinus infection symptoms to make me drag myself to the health center, where I needed no appointment and only a $10 co-pay (since, you know, I pay a few hundred dollars a year for the service, but that's another matter).  In the meantime, a wonderful friend and neighbor had given me her collection of OTC cold medicine so I didn't have to get my own, because I probably would not have bothered.  When those drugs ran out, I bought more, although I was disappointed not to find my favorite Robitussin Cold, Cough and Flu.

I'm sick again.  I felt it Friday morning but ignored it, simply drinking even more tea than normal.  And doing things like ice skating, because, you know, that's great for sore throats.  Yesterday I laid around, drinking more tea and finishing my honey.  Only running out of honey (and the fact that I already had to leave the house to go to church) compelled me to go to the grocery store to get more honey, lemon, and cold medicine.  Now that it has kicked in, I'm starting to wonder why I didn't do this sooner, like yesterday, or Friday.  It would have been a much better form of procrastinating writing my last lit paper EVER than the forms I chose.  Regardless, I apparently have decided that sucking it up and drinking tea is a better form of dealing with being sick than getting medicine and feeling better.

It's funny how quickly some experiences can wipe out a lifetime of habits and "common sense".

 If only I was back in a culture where little packs of tissue could be bought anywhere for mere pennies, since, you know, I've now used up all my tissues but didn't buy them at the store today.  I suppose I'll take being in a culture where the toilet paper is soft and basically the same as a tissue instead of thick, gray crepe paper...

And yes, this is another form of procrastination from finishing that stupid lit paper.

Well, this is depressing

How did I never consider how depressing an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies could be?

On Mondays, I have an introductory class on the field, which is to give us an overview of the various issues in the field and help us find direction and understand what we're getting into.  We wrestle with communist legacies, memory, transitions to democracy that have been fraught with problems and corruption, ethnic tension and discrimination everywhere, environmental degradation, nationalism, and other cheery topics.

Then I go to a small group associated with the church I go to in Bloomington.  Some days, I look around this bible study and think "Library science, library science, biology, computer science, higher education...these people have normal majors.  They don't talk about authoritarian regimes as if they're normal or regularly discuss ethnic cleansing.  What have I gotten myself into?"

Because, in my field, we do regularly discuss all the ways the various groups have been horribly victimized and have also perpetrated horrifying acts against their neighbors.  The 20th century was not kind to humanity.  And, I get to wrestle with what it did to Eastern Europe and how to deal with that now.  It's not pretty.

And now, instead of going home and enjoying family and turkey, I'm spending the first part of Thanksgiving break writing about Central Asian migration to Russia for my anthropology class on Central Asia.  For those of you who don't live mired in post-Soviet space, here's a map of the 5 Central Asian republics, the Caucasus (which includes my beloved Georgia), Russia to the north, and all those countries war hawks keep in the news to the south.

This area, filled with 'stans' has "democracies" that are ruled by dictators and kleptocrats.  If that's not depressing enough, researching migration of most of the able-bodied males in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to Russia unearths the crushing poverty of these countries.  I was excited about the topic, because it's very relevant to the current political/economic situation of Russia but somehow overlooked how incredibly depressing it could be to research.  Economic constraints force men to leave their families for months, years, maybe never to return.  Women are left behind to take care of families on impossibly small salaries, and the number who are forced into illegal labor migration and sexual trafficking can be barely hinted at in official statistics.

This isn't making me regret choosing this field, but it certainly carries an unexpected burden.  I suppose it gives me even more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving where, like a normal American, I'll gorge myself on delicious food, surrounded by family in a comfortable home with heat, light, and creature comforts.

A Gogo in Grad School

It's obviously been a while since I last wrote, mostly because my life is now filled with reading and writing and not sitting on marshrutkas and teaching Georgian children.  However, I've been mulling the idea of continuing the blog for a while, and I think I'm going to try to.  I doubt I'll write as extensively or as regularly, but my everyday life isn't nearly as exciting, so it seems fair.  In case you're wondering, gogo (გოგო) means 'girl' in Georgian.  It's "slang", which means Tbilisi Georgians didn't like the word but everywhere else it was used all the time.  The word flew around my house, and I miss hearing the word.  I'll roll out more posts soon, but for now, I'll leave you with the subject of debate from my Monday night class.