Cultural learnings for make benefit me

This coming week will be the last week of term, meaning that from next weekend onwards I will be enjoying a mixture of holidays and days spent in solitary seclusion studying for my next round of exams. In all honesty, I have lost much of the zeal that I managed to muster during the previous series. Most of the courses I had this term were just not as interesting to me as they had substantially less to do with the healthcare sector. I did courses in Strategic Management and Marketing, for instance, which are simply not my cup-of-tea. I will still study of course and, being me, I will still want to do well but my heart is not really in it. After my exams I only have one bit of collective course work left where we have to engage in a business plan competition with each other. Everybody assures me this part will be a lot of fun but I am not convinced yet. I simply do not see myself as a true-blooded entrepreneur, but I will try to keep an open mind about it.

What I am very excited about, however, is what we will get to do after that: our individual research reports. This will be the major assignment of the whole course and constitutes an individual part of research and the writing of –here we go again– a thesis. You are largely free to decide what topic you want to work on and it is generally considered a useful stepping stone into whatever career you wish to pursue afterwards. Although recently I have been applying for consultancy jobs my dream is still to work for organisations such as WHO or the Red Cross. Early in the year I spoke with one of my professors about this as he does a lot of work for WHO and he suggested that I do my final project in his group. Last week we discussed what sort of project I can do that will put me on the radar of these organisations. I came out of his office with a big stupid grin on my face that lasted for several days! In fact, I think I might still be grinning now.

I have been given the amazing opportunity to work on a project that will likely involve working with people in WHO and several other healthcare institutions. That is not even the best part of it though. To phrase it in my professor's words, I will be getting my “boots dirty” and not exactly in the most obvious of places… The dirt I will be scraping off my boots is to be found in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan! I had to Google a map to see where exactly Kyrgyzstan is but eventually I was able to locate this “Switzerland of Central Asia” somewhere between Russia and China. I have no idea yet on the details of anything. I am not even sure what it is exactly that I will be doing, or how long I will be doing it for, over there. It will definitely not be before the summer and there are a lot of other things to do before then but I am already so excited about it that I simply had to share this news. Once things become clearer I will certainly keep you updated. In the mean time I will alternate reading my boring text books with staring at the pictures in my brand new Lonely Planet on Central Asia. Very nice!