Among Giants

I knew coming into this program that I would come across “The Credentials”: people that have accomplished such amazing feats that I could have spent every day since my high school graduation watching Jerry Springer reruns and be about as close to their stratosphere as I would be actually putting in effort.

The intimidation-by-default begins with my professors. For anyone curious, knighthood titles come before academic titles. I know that now since I have a Sir Dr. as one of my instructors. I have heard of knighthood but never actually met anyone who has ever been in the same room as a queen (any queen to my knowledge), let alone have one hold a sword anywhere in the vicinity of major arteries.

Another professor was a foreign reporter in Afghanistan during the war with the USSR and then in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is considered an expert in Afghanistan although he was kind enough to not assign his books as part of our encyclopedia thick booklist. In essence, sitting in his class is like getting the book-on-tape version of the material.

Another professor apologetically canceled class for next week because the “President” of Chechnya invited her to the opening ceremony of a new Mosque, and she hates to turn down official invitations.

The material is just as daunting. The one class’s overview read like a laundry list of everything that I don’t know: Unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (“Think I missed that class”); Disintegration and Reconciliation in Tajikistan (“I know where that country is on the map!”); critical assessments of events in Andijan, Uzbekistan that took place in May 2005 (“huh?”); the increasing influence of China in Central Asia and Xinjiang (“oh, oh, oh! I was there. Finally, I know something”).

My fellow classmates carry their own level of prestige. In one small class we went around and introduced ourselves. In the class is a Columbian drug enforcement officer, two UN staff members, a former peacekeeper in Rwanda and the Congo, two Norwegian soldiers who just returned from Afghanistan, a PriceWaterhouseCooper partner, a State Department officer…oh and me.

Someone much smarter than me, most likely my mom, told me once that regardless of what everyone else has done, if they are sitting in the same room as me, than they are at the exact same point in their lives as I am. When it became my turn to introduce myself, nobody chuckled or refused to meet my eye. I was even taken by surprise when my professor, one of the stratosphere-hovering Credentials, said, “Oh, Miami University in Ohio…good school; I’ve been there.”

I was accepted as a peer among them. Although this year is going to be insanely difficult, I have a feeling that it will all be okay.