Q: How did your Slavic studies prepare you for your future career? What was the most important thing you learned?
A: It led me to a career as a foreign correspondent in Moscow during the early 1990s.
Q: How did your Slavic studies contribute more generally to your life?
A: It showed me how much learning another language can open up unimagined new worlds and new opportunities. It's one of the few subjects in the humanities that has the potential to truly transform one's life.
Q: What did you do immediately upon graduation?
A: I went to Columbia University to do a master's in journalism, and afterwards left for Istanbul and Moscow to work as a journalist.
Q: What advice would you give to graduating students, or to students thinking about the Slavic program?
A: Think about where your language skills can useful - the worlds of diplomacy, business, NGOs, the military - and start thinking about a strategy for going forward into those areas. If you've studied Russian and can speak it well, you're in a small minority of people with those skills, at a time when Russia is playing a growing role in geopolitics, business, finance and military affairs.