On Wednesday I had my first class in the Spring Term – Global Perspectives. I enjoyed the class and got very favorable impression of the professor. He has been teaching in the International Business Department for a long time and still has not lost interest in teaching the subject.
The subject itself is very interesting for me personally. I really like to learn more about the subtleties of the global business environment and pecularites of some other countries’ business and political, as these are inevitably intertwined sometimes more than we would expect or want, practices and policies. I realize that in a 7 week course we will only have a chance to get a pre-taste for this, but still it is going to be very interesting. Professor has a very engaging manner of teaching, posing some non-trivial questions and promoting genuine discussion with the class. The class will have a lot of mini-cases which I find very interesting. Of course, it means a lot of reading. Oh, well. Professor seems to be quite laid back. I hope this attitude will carry over to his grading practices.
One of the advices he gave us was to regularly read/skim Financial Times. According to professor this is the only business newspaper published in the US that has more of an international, or global, outlook on the business events. Others, like Wall Street Journal, look at the international business events more from the perspective of the US. I actually going to subscribe for it for at least this semester. Especially since students are offered deep discounts from the regular subscription price.
Apart from the class itself it was very exciting to get back on campus after almost 4 weeks winter break. Even though GWU School of Business does not have cohort system for Professional MBA, you enevitably have classes with at least some of the classmates from previous classes. It was really nice to see people after a break. We had a kind of a “re-union” of people from the Microeconomics class from the first module in Fall term. We actually formed a study group for the group research paper which is going to 25% of the grade. There are five of us all know each other from Microeconomics and some other classes overlaps in fall. Preliminary we agreed that we would like to knock off this paper earlier in the module, even though paper is due at the last class, to be free from it for the week of finals.
Coming back to school is nice. All excruciating memories of fall finals are “forgotten and forgiven” 
. I hope that it is going to be a bit easier this term, as I am getting used to studying and getting into “the zone”. Aside from a class it was sort of fuzzy nostalgic feeling driving again the same route along McArthur Blvd to the campus. I actually like driving that route, with some quite nice spots of Georgetown neighborhood.
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