The last couple posts of mine have been very “MBAish” in nature... addressing topics such as tuition costs, student loans, starting salaries and my new acquiring wealth class. As this blog is supposed to cover both the professional and personal side of my MBA, I think its about time that all of you met my girlfriend Sheila Exposito. She actually doesn’t know that she is going to be the topic of this blog post so I hope this goes over well!
Sheila is 23 years old and lives in Madrid, Spain. Its about this time in the story that people raise their eyebrows and think I’m a little crazy! Then when I add in the point about how we met in the airport in Oslo, Norway some people begin to lose faith in the credibility of the story! This is our story...
I met Sheila for the first time on April 30th, 2009. I had just finished up my study abroad program at Oxford and was visiting Ireland and Norway for a week before I came back to start my internship. I met Sheila in the airport first when I got to Norway, and then once again as I was leaving. At that time, she was managing a restaurant in the airport that my friend and I were eating in. After meeting her the second time and speaking with her for about 15 minutes, I asked for her Facebook contact information (very 21st century!).
Over the course of the summer and fall we began to video chat on Skype on an almost daily basis. What started out as a cool international friend soon became much more. After literally several hundred hours of video chatting, we decided that Sheila should come out to the US during my winter break from the MBA program. Our break was a full month long so we figured that we would have enough time to spend together to find out if our new international connection was something serious worth pursuing.
Sheila came to the US for the first time on Dec 2nd. That day started the best month of my life. I did my best to show Sheila my entire world in only 26 days! We toured Malibu, walked through Santa Monica, went to Vegas, traveled to San Francisco, drove along the CA coast and spent Christmas with my family in Fresno. The month was amazing to say the least. We had many long conversations about the future and what we wanted in life. I think we were both a little surprised at how much we had in common coming from such different backgrounds.
Let me tell you a little about Sheila, as she is a very impressive woman! Sheila was born and raised in Madrid, Spain and comes from a very large family (27 members vs my 4). Sheila graduated from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2008 with a double bachelors in International Journalism and Audio-Visual Communications. During her undergraduate studies, she was a reporter for the newspaper La Razon publishing articles about international issues, politics and sports. After taking a “gap year” (year off after undergraduate education, common in Europe) in Norway, she started her masters program in Audio-Visual Communications. In addition to her impressive background, Sheila is fluent in 8 languages! No that isn’t a typo... Sheila is completely fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. As you can imagine, being that I am still trying to master English, that is incredibly impressive to me.
Currently, Sheila is finishing up her masters program and will graduate in June of this year. She got a Public Relations internship with the New York based fashion design company Carolina Herrera at their Madrid office. Once she has completed her first masters and internship, Sheila has plans to pursue her MBA in the US.
We are both very excited about our future together. In an attempt to bring this back to the MBA program, I think that Sheila and I are a perfect example of how an MBA program can make you more global. Since starting my MBA, I have lived with students from China, South Korea and Botswana. I have travelled to England, Ireland and Norway. I have good friends all over the world from places like Egypt, El Salvador, India, Germany, Japan, China, and Ukraine. I worked for an international company for my summer internship. And now to top it all off... I have a girlfriend in Madrid. Crazy times we MBA students live in.
