The Holidays Can't Come Soon Enough

November 11th, 2007

My first semester of grad school is drawing to a close, and it's been the most hectic three months of my entire life. I guess I shouldn't complain, since it has also been very enjoyable, but I am looking forward to a vacation. This week I am working with my team to finish up our semester integrative project. We present that on Friday and then our last class session is the week after Thanksgiving.

Currently the biggest dilemma regarding my MBA program is choosing a topic for my thesis / final project. My current ideas are pretty vague, with words like "technology", "international", and "non-profit" floating about with little in the way of actual plans. This is becoming a problem, since I need to have any travel scheduled by January or February in order to have time over the summer to actually work on the thesis. I'm finding that an executive MBA is a little more challenging in the sense that I don't have three months for a huge internship in the summer. This restricts the kinds of topics I can choose, since any really involved research I do has to be stuffed into two weeks of vacation from my job.

Back in August when I brainstormed over possible topics, I realized that if a foreign language was going to be part of the experience, it would have to be Russian. My French is too shaky for even intermediate business terminology, and would require a heavy commitment in time to get up to snuff. My Russian, which I haven't actively spoken since a research trip in 2001, had accumulated some serious cobwebs, but I knew that the grammar and vocabulary were buried somewhere, just waiting to be brought back to light. The problem was finding a tutor. When Kayla and I were planning our vacation to France, I hired a Belgian friend to come to our house and work with me for about two months prior to the trip. This time, I resorted to the Internet. The results have been encouraging. Each week I have a 45-minute lesson with a tutor I found through VerbalPlanet.com. For seven euro per lesson, she works me through the painful process of remembering a language I once spoke more or less fluently. We use Skype to talk for free and she posts a list of vocabulary to review each week. After about ten lessons I can finally converse without stumbling on every word, and feel reasonably confident that by the summer I will be back in decent shape. Assuming, of course, that I end up doing anything related to Russian.