Why the Foreign Language?

Students from Serbia and other ex-Yugoslavian countries rarely choose to apply to leading programs in economics and related fields. Based on personal experience, a major contributor to this phenomenon is the absence of guidance and a dearth of information. This may sound strange, given the abundance of resources available online, but it is not at all surprising.

Most of them have never had a chance to meet a graduate from a research university, nor to hear about the resources. Moreover, their professors have almost exclusively graduated from the same institutions where they are now employed, and they are often unaware of the benefits offered by programs abroad. In this environment, students tend to follow the well-trodden path.

Many thus decide not to pursue further academic development. Personally, I was unbelievably lucky with the professors I had the chance to learn from and I have been ushered to consider other programs mainly by people whom I met in serendipitous encounters (predominantly in summer schools). I am aware that not everybody will have such good fortune.

I hope to make the access to information more equitable and to help expand the choice set of the many brilliant students across the Balkans. To make the posts in this blog more attractive to the target audience, they will mostly be written in Serbian. Hopefully, this will make them appealing and useful to Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Macedonian/Slovenian speakers, as well.