Learn for Life (and send your kids abroad)

My Sunday evening program does not usually include going to a lecture, but my old university supervisor from 12 years back (International Relations Masters at the London School of Economics) is in town (Berlin) and gave a talk on Britain and the EU to alumni, just around the corner from my place, so I decided to go. I didn't think a) he'd remember me, b) there would be anyone in the audience I would know (or anyone in the audience on a Sunday evening. End.).

Well, wrong on both fronts. Although I'm very active in alumni work for my Berlin university (I did a second masters five years after the first one), I have been lousy with alumni contacts from London, although I loved my years there. This was the first event I went to. I plan to go to more.

My supervisor, now a Liberal Democrat in charge of foreign policy in the coalition government, remembered who I was. More impressive, I bumped into someone whom I started my PhD year with (he became a Doctor, I quit very early into the program), as well as another professor I know. It was great fun to catch up on people who were in my year.

But the best part was to listen to a topic that I rather passively follow (through the media, and even there I often skip much of the UK news these days), from a perspective that I have not followed since my studies (i.e. "real foreign policy"), and from a person who has a truly British perspective on things. It was as if I had been transported to a different, older world, where people ask questions about defense cooperation and budgets (do these things really shape the world? It's such a different discourse from what I'm used to these days, either general budgets or health/aid (the latter unfortunately definitely does not shape the world enough)).

At the end of the day, whether defense budgets and foreign policy or what not, the world I live in is so small. It's a privilege, and I should use and learn from the intelligence out there more (see last post on networking).

The "lesson" I am supposed to share from this evening (says my Professor): send your kids abroad early. Everyone is a "foreigner" somewhere. No need to say more.