Minsk to Mist

Hard to believe that, but it’s me on my graduation day, ca. 2012

In my previous post, following a few nostalgic moments reminiscing of the time when I was in my early twenties, I shared the story of how I ended up signing up for an MBA at The Open University. This is my first ever experience studying outside of my native country, in a foreign language, fully online (short-term training courses aside) – and for an MBA, no less! It’s a good thing that I didn’t think out of it like that at the time, otherwise, I would have chickened out.

While they do require you to have completed a formal degree before, the realities of studying back in Belarus and doing an online MBA in the UK came into a stark contrast. Here are some of the key differences I have noticed:

• No babysitting and no spoon-feeding

The educational systems in the former Soviet Union are based on a predicament that you are supposed to learn a lot by heart. Without thinking too much. Just learn. The professors are there to help you get those hard facts (that, of course, will be changing with any scientific advancement) and to make them a bit easier to memorise. Also, to remind you of the assignment deadlines, to harass you into meeting those deadlines and to tell you how your approach to learning is wrong.

It actually proves to be helpful sometimes. At least you get guidance on the professors’ expectations early on. You may be complaining about how these expectations are unrealistic (they can be) or how challenging it is to work on multiple subjects and multiple assignments with conflicting priorities – but you KNOW what is expected from you. My MBA online experience shows that it might not always be the case (more on it later).

• A lot of independent research expected – which messes up your schedule when you are time-blind

Information Technology, the industry I work for, is notorious for its missed estimates and projects going badly outside of their budgets. Some people blame software developers and engineers for poor estimates that gave the wrong impression of how long something might take. Now that I have completed my first module, I know that estimates are absolutely ‘finger-in-the-air’ and have nothing to do with the reality.

My module materials were providing estimated time to complete each assignment. I haven’t been measuring each of them with a stopwatch, but I can say that most times these estimates are off. Especially when your task is to go to the library and find a few academic articles on the topic of the module. You start by reading about the supply chain in the chocolate industry (and how deeply unfair it is on the cocoa bean farmers), proceed to exploring the ways some players in the industry are trying to tackle these inequalities – only to come across an article claiming that addressing those inequalities is absolutely impossible. Not without deep government-level changes anyway.

Before you know it, 3 hours of your life are gone. The estimate was 1 hour. You haven’t even started writing your piece.

And here comes the next thing:

• Academic writing in English is even more convoluted than it is in Russian

No matter how far I have managed to come in building my command of the English language, it is still not a native one for me. And to be perfectly candid, I HATE the academic language in Russian/ Belarusian, too! My pragmatic brain finds it incomprehensible that people design their sentences and choose their words to be MORE complicated for a reader to grasp it, not EASIER. The very platform I am using to publish this blog is giving me instant feedback on how long my sentences are and how I’m trying to use my knowledge of English to show off – and that might be putting my readers off! Yet, when you are trying to learn something, you have to soldier through pages and pages written in tongues, wasting your mental energy on trying to figure out what on Earth were the authors trying to say!

You can imagine the initial result of that post-Soviet attitude towards education on my part was lamentable. First time around, I failed my starting module. I failed it BADLY! A summa cum laude (‘with highest honours’) degree 15 years ago – and I got… 15 out of 100 for my first assignment. Boy, I was mortified…

What happened next

When prompted to elaborate on what Belarusians and Brits have in common, I always mention one shared trait that certainly makes it easier for me to integrate into the local society.

Resilience.

When a Brit gets screwed up, loses everything, they just move on. When a Belarusian gets punched in the guts and into the dirt, they get up and move on. That’s something both people know how to do. And had centuries of practice doing it.

A few things needed to change in my approach if I wanted to succeed in my online MBA in the UK. More on that – in the next post.

To be continued…