The American MBA Program

Abstract

And for this I left my home, an almost completed dissertation, a position in the department, and a recently created company? My disillusionment knew no bounds. It was my first class in an American business school—Economics—and I felt like I had been transported many years back, to my very first lecture in my very first year at Moscow University. It wasn't just that the professor was talking about things with which I had long been thoroughly familiar; rather, it was that the students around me were taking in his words as practically a revelation, as if it were they and not I who had come from far-off Russia, where no one had ever heard of microeconomics. It seemed like everything was new to them, and the simplest problems threw them for a loop. I was saddened—what could they possibly teach me here? I felt like getting on an airplane bound for Moscow.