Travelling without moving

Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia... in my mind I have travelled thousands of miles already, visiting new and exciting places. In reality I am still sitting in my room looking out over the familiar skies of London. For weeks, months now, my travel plans have bounced around like a restless pingpong ball. I have been moved like a pawn over an invisible chessboard drawn across the map of EurAsia.

My original project was to be in Central Asia. Then, just weeks before it was about to start we had to reconsider. The twinned stars of science and funding had not yet lined up and until they did, the project was at a standstill. Kyrgyzstan transformed into Russia. The contacts had been made, the plan was drawn up and the research done. Suddenly, for reasons still shrouded in mystery, the Russians dropped off the radar and went incommunicado. A mild panic started to grip me by the throat. Only seven more weeks until the thesis is due and the rug gets pulled out from under my project! More back-up plans were dreamed up, like rabbits pulled out of a hat. Turkey, Moldova, Bulgaria. What country east of Hungary wasn't suggested?

Then cosmic intervention. The stars have finally started to align. Kyrgyzstan has come back into focus. Not for the orginal plan but for an improvised patchwork formed of the original and the new project. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I am excited but by now won't actually believe anything anymore until I land at Bishkek airport and the custom officers let me in.

Я не говорю на русском языке

Alright, I have promised you that I would explain to you all soon why I was talking about Russia before.

Some time ago I wrote here about a project my thesis supervisor assigned me to in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Unfortunately we are still waiting for the funding approval of this project to come through. Since I have a thesis deadline in September that is non-negotiable, we can't sit around and wait for that. Instead, he has now offered me a different project for which everything is already arranged. This project, as you will have guessed by now, will take place in Russia.

The focus of the project is slightly different but it still involves analysis of the healthcare offered to tuberculosis patients. The Red Cross is running a TB programme in several Russian regions and my project centres on the evaluation of the effectiveness of this programme in one of these. I am being thrown in at the deep end a bit by my supervisor because the information I just gave you is pretty much about all I know myself. I only know that I am expected to be travelling to Russia and spent about two weeks doing interviews with people there. That is of course, if I can sort out my visa application on time.

The Central Asia project is not necessarily out the window either. If the funding approval comes through soon, I just might get to work on that after my thesis project. It is all very exciting what is happening now but to be honest, I am somewhat worried I may be getting in over my head. For somebody who only last year was still trying to purify proteins from E.coli my career is making a very drastic sudden move. It is what I really want to do and why I came to London in the first place. It's just scary when dreams start becoming reality.

My golden ticket

It's been a while since I gave an update on my plans for life after I finish my degree. Mostly that's because with all the assignments and exams going on I simply haven't had much occasion to think about it, let alone take any action. Well, the lecture & exam part of my course is behind me so it's time to start focusing on the future. And it looks like that future will involve me hanging around in London for another while.

I have mentioned before that over the summer I will be working on a really interesting and exciting project for my final thesis. In a nutshell, we'll be looking at the resource allocation (techno-speak for spending money) on combating tuberculosis in parts of Central Asia. I won't be doing this all by myself obviously as it involves a lot of work and, even more importantly, requires some real serious experience. The work will be part of the ongoing research at the College. The whole project will also most likely take substantially more time than the three months I have to do my thesis work in. Which is why my time here in London will be stretched out.

My supervisor on this project has invited me to stay on in his group for a while so that I can gain some relevant experience and further build my resume. He is a real authority in his field and this is a great opportunity for me. Naturally I am taking him up on his offer. We'll be working on some other projects as well. My position in the group will more or less be that of an intern. I will not be directly employed by the University but I will be getting some sort of pay. I haven't even asked how much or for how long. The opportunity is too good to let such 'trivial details' matter. ;-) The idea is that with the added experience and his contacts doors will open for me that without are much harder to crack. I will have to prove myself of course but at least I am getting the best leg up I could possibly hope for. Now it's up to me to climb that wall to my dream job.

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!