The Badgers Abroad Blog

Nick Holt graduated from UW-Madison in 2002 with a BA in International Relations [now International Studies]. He studied abroad in Cairo, Egypt. After graduation he worked for international relief organizations in the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon. He graduated with an MPA from Princeton University in 2006, and joined the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Service Officer in 2007. Nick is presently serving at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where he coordinates political reporting on Iraq’s southern provinces. His 15-month tour will conclude in September 2008.

What’s a favorite memory about UW-Madison?

I wasn’t much of a high school student, and I remember the day freshmen year when I realized I was actually enjoying going to class.  That feeling never really left me, and it marked a turning point in how I saw myself and the world around me.  Oh, and all the partying.

How did UW-Madison prepare you for what you do now?

The Arabic classes certainly helped.

What drew you to study Arabic?

I wanted to study something different and considered Chinese and Arabic. I’m more or less tone deaf, so settled on Arabic. At the time, I endured a lot of skepticism from people who thought Arabic was useless. That changed four years later.

Why did you choose to study abroad in Cairo?

I knew the only way I would ever really learn Arabic was to live somewhere in the Middle East.  What I didn’t realize was that, seven years later, I’d still have so much Arabic left to learn.

What is your most memorable experience while studying abroad in Cairo?

I represented the U.S. in the annual Model UN simulation, and managed to convince all of the Egyptian students to join a coalition against Russia (I happened to be dating the ‘Russian’ delegate at the time).  If only I could be as successful a diplomat in real life…

What skills did you learn while studying abroad that help you now?

Cairo was a plunge into Egyptian culture.  In some ways this tour has been a plunge into the culture of the U.S. military.  Very different, but the same rules apply: treat people with patience and dignity and always be willing to learn.

What languages do you use everyday?

English and Arabic.

What advice would you give to an undergraduate student with ambitions to go into international diplomacy?

As a senior at UW, I failed the oral exam for the Foreign Service.  It was the best thing that ever happened to me, and led to a very interesting couple of years working abroad in conflict zones.  All that’s to say, don’t stress out too much about your long-term career, as hard as that might be, but find something you enjoy doing and do it.  The Foreign Service will always be around, and the more experience you have before entering, the better a diplomat you’ll be.

What do you see the role that American international diplomacy will play in the next five years?

Ask me again in November.

“I don’t feel I’ve ever had a career,” says Constance Konold without apology as she sips Earl Grey tea in a fashionable café on Paris’ Left Bank where the maitre d’ knows her by name. No, she explains, hers has been more of a non-career just doing what she wanted to in life, a life that, so far, has taken this businesswoman, executive coach, consultant and self-described adventurer around the world to posts with top international companies. What’s made it possible, Konold tells you, is UW-Madison. It gave her the language skills, cosmopolitan attitude, and job contacts necessary to succeed.

Drawn to UW-Madison by Hoofers and the French House, Konold majored in French. It was a language she had begun studying, along with Latin, at St. Mary’s Academy in South Bend, Indiana, the town she moved to from the New York area when she was ten. She remembers having classes with some of UW-Madison’s “greats,” acclaimed French professors Germaine Bree, and Helen Cassidy. In the History department, her favorite was French historian Harvey Goldberg. “He was spellbinding and unorthodox, people hung from the rafters,” Konold says, recalling how hundreds of students would cram into Goldberg’s lecture hall. Konold has kept her notes from her course with Goldberg. “He gave us such insight,” she says, keys to understanding the world. (more…)

As a young man, George McReddie didn’t plan to travel or have a career in international finance. He had no idea he would become Senior Managing Director at Bear, Stearns & Co., a leading global investment banking, securities trading, and brokerage firm based in New York. Back in the 1960s, he was just your average American teenager growing up on Long Island, New York.

Then one day, when McReddie was a sophomore in high school, his father, who was born in Argentina, announced to the family he was moving them to Buenos Aires. A few months later, McReddie (BA, Political Science/Ibero-American Studies,’76) was living in that capital city, enrolled at the American Community High School. “It was quite an upheaval,” he says. He spoke very little Spanish at the time.

Fate stepped in again when it was time for McReddie to go to college. His high school principal in Buenos Aires, Thomas Kalish, had earned his B.B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. (Educational Administration) at UW-Madison. Kalish encouraged McReddie, who was becoming interested in both political science and Latin-American studies, to go to Madison. “It was a campus that was engaged in world affairs and that appealed to me,” McReddie says. (more…)

The little, picture postcard Swiss village of Nyon has a big reputation. Founded over two thousand years ago by Julius Caesar, it can lay claim to Roman ruins, a 16th century castle, and beautiful views of Lake Geneva. It can also boast it’s the home to Novartis Consumer Health, a division of the international health products company, and to Novartis executive and UW-Madison alumnus Ricardo Blank.

Blank never would have predicted when he was a UW student some thirty years ago that he would wind up here, heading the division’s medical marketing department. Back in Madison, Blank had his heart set on a career in America, but fate and his father intervened.

Blank (B.S. ’74, M.B.A. ’77) was born in Santiago, Chile, the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930’s. In Santiago, Blank’s parents sent him to a private school where he learned English. Closer to home, he conversed in Spanish with his friends, and German with his parents. His facility with languages would become a significant theme in his personal and professional life.

Blank wanted to study business but his father was convinced one didn’t need a degree in the field to be successful.  After all, he had built his own cosmetics company, later sold to Proctor and Gamble, from the ground up. “Study something worthwhile like chemistry,” Blank’s father counseled. The two made a deal. Blank would get a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, then a master’s in business administration.

Blank had originally hoped to go to university in Santiago, but he says the election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970 made remaining in Chile impossible. “I knew what was coming,” Blank says, referring to Allende’s assassination and years of political repression. Blank packed his bags and left for the U.S. the day Allende was inaugurated. (more…)

HTML clipboardSpider-Man he’s not but scientist Paul Brey does share a few characteristics with the Marvel Comics superhero. Years ago, like Spider-Man, Brey was “bitten” by an insect and, as a result, became motivated to work for the benefit of humanity.  The story goes something like this.

As a quiet and unassuming youngster growing up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin (not Forest Hills, New York), Paul Brey was interested in natural history. His first scientific explorations were into the flora and fauna of eastern Wisconsin, along Lake Michigan and in the Kettle Moraine. He was interested in bugs but it was his father’s fear of insects that prompted Brey (BS, Natural Science, 1979) to pay particular attention to them. – Brey’s father and two uncles were blind, the result of a congenital illness, and Brey remembers his father’s aversion to dragon flies, calling them sewing needles because of the noise they made. Brey’s understanding and appreciation of insects deepened when, as a teenager, he worked summers for a beekeeper. “Beekeeping absorbed me into entomology,” he says.

When Brey enrolled at UW-Madison, he gravitated toward the sciences. He worked part-time in the USDA’s honeybee laboratory with one of the state’s leading apiary experts, Floyd E. Moeller. It was bees, and Moeller’s encouragement, that took him to France.

The French had been actively researching diseases of honeybees. In the early 1970’s, Wisconsin had just begun witnessing the emergence of “chalkbrood,” a white-colored fungus that attacked the honeycomb and killed bee larvae. Brey spent the summer of 1977 studying at the Laboratoire Nationale de Recherche Apicole in Nice. It was his first time overseas and the experience was “shockingly formative.”  “When he arrived in southern France, he knew only the present and past tense of French verbs. “That was my level of French, but it was enough to encourage me to go further,” he says. France was foreign, new, refreshing, like walking back into history, Brey recalls. His visit also opened new horizons, introducing him to the larger scientific world of microbiology.

When he was in high school, Brey had admired Louis Pasteur, the 19th  century French chemist and microbiologist who developed a heating process, “pasteurization,” to sterilize wine, beer  and milk products. Pasteur also invented the germ theory of disease and the first cure for silkworm diseases and human rabies. Brey had been impressed with Pasteur’s scientific discoveries but he was also inspired by the Frenchman’s commitment to public health and humanitarian work. The Institute, founded in 1887, is a private foundation dedicated to the prevention and treatment of diseases, through biological research, education and public health.

One of Brey’s colleagues in Nice had given him a letter of introduction to scientists at Pasteur and Brey was able to spend a day touring the Institute in Paris. “It was like going to the Mecca of biological research. It was awesome in the true sense of the word,” Brey says. The young scientist felt a special connection to the Institute and began to plan a way to return.

Back in the U.S., Brey received a French government scholarship to do graduate work in Paris at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), while also doing research at the Pasteur Institute. Although his UW-Madison professors discouraged him from continuing his studies abroad, Brey’s parents were supportive. “You can always come home,” his father said.

Going to France to study was daunting. The language and cultural challenges at the university, not to mention graduate work in the sciences, were considerable. Courses were held in French and even though Brey had studied the language for four years at UW-Madison, he still wasn’t totally fluent. “I struggled,” Brey says. He would come home from class exhausted, but he stuck it out, receiving a master’s degree in 1980, a doctorat du troisième cycle in 1982 and a doctorat d’état in 1987.

Brey did research at Pasteur during his graduate studies and was thrilled in 1987 when he was offered a permanent position. His graduate research involving aphids and mosquitoes had focused on insect pathogens not human ones. However, at Pasteur, his work evolved to include the study of the interactions between mosquito vectors and human pathogens.

In 1989, he spent two years in Japan for postdoctoral study at Hokkaido University in Sapporo and underwent what he calls a metamorphosis. Much as when he traveled to France for the first time, he was projected into a completely different culture and language, this time in an isolated region of northern Japan. He became fascinated with oriental religions and philosophies, including Taoism and Buddhism.

Brey’s research work also underwent a transformation. He had been studying insect biochemistry, especially in the mosquito that transmits yellow fever. Now, he turned to the silkworm and discovered that there was an immune response in the cuticle of the insect, which had previously been considered devoid of any immune response. Brey concluded correctly that the cuticle, like skin, was reactive to injury and an entry point for a pathogen or infectious or disease-causing agent. This result impacted scientists studying innate immunity in vertebrates. When Brey returned to France, he formed his own research laboratory focusing on insect immunology and host-parasite interactions. Most recently, the lab and scientists affiliated with the unit have been working on genome analysis of the malaria parasite vector and on mosquito saliva, hoping to find ways “to interrupt or regulate the parasite transmission to human hosts.”

While the lab work continues, Brey has assumed additional, administrative responsibilities after nearly 20 years at Pasteur. He was recently appointed regional advisor for the Asia Pacific region of the Pasteur Institute International Network, and is based in Vietnam. The Pasteur Institute International Network comprises 30 Institutes world-wide. In his administrative work, Brey facilitates interactions among Pasteur researchers working on major pathogens across the region, such as viral encephalitis and Avian flu, and consults with other scientists and health professionals on improving research and public health delivery systems.

Brey occasionally returns to Madison. In 2005 and 2006, he met with students interested in international scientific careers, and also visited his daughter, an undergraduate majoring in classical humanities.

When he spoke to students, Brey cited Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist, stating that the best educational experience one could give young people was travel. “We live in a world where frontiers and borders are shrinking at a speed that is unimaginable,” Brey told the students. “International experience opens your mind and your spirit. You realize other people think and do things differently.” Brey advised the students to “take the jump,” and then, remembering his father’s encouragement, added, “you can always come home.”

James Friedlander dances to the beat of a different drummer. Or put another way, since Robert Frost is one of his favorite poets, Friedlander prefers to take the road not taken. And it has made all the difference. It brought him to UW-Madison for his undergraduate education and determined his eventual career path.

Friedlander, founder and sole partner of Friedlander & Associates, a Law Firm, with an office in Moscow, has 40 years of international corporate, financial and negotiation experience with both the private sector and senior levels of government. But back in the late 1950’s, as a senior at Winnetka’s New Trier High School, Friedlander didn’t have his sights set on an international law career, let alone UW-Madison.

Although among the top students of his graduating class, he wasn’t admitted to the college of his choice. When his options became either the University of Michigan or UW, he selected Madison because many of his classmates were going to Ann Arbor. “Being the way I normally am, I went in the opposite direction,” Friedlander says. “I couldn’t have made a better choice. I had a fabulous four years here.”

At UW-Madison, Friedlander had no grand design and, other than a couple years of German, took no other language or international courses, with the exception of one political science course he confesses to not doing particularly well in — on the politics of underdeveloped countries. “My interest was in existing, I didn’t want to be anything,” he says.

He threw himself into sports. He joined the tennis team and got knocked out in his first year playing intra-mural touch football. In Friedlander’s senior year, he worked with the Badgers’ hockey coach, running the entire UW intramural sports program. A sometimes pianist, he also took an active part in “Humorology,” the variety show organized by campus fraternities and sororities. He majored in political science and psychology, and took several art history courses. His dream was to get a master’s in art history and to teach high school, but his father wanted him to get a law degree first. This time, his first choice was UW but when Harvard also said yes, Friedlander’s father insisted on Cambridge. Looking back, Friedlander (BA, ’63) has no regrets. He is convinced that both institutions provide an outstanding legal education, but Harvard, where he received his J.D. degree in ’66, has the edge when it comes to networking. Supreme Court Justice David Souter was one of his classmates.

As an undergraduate at UW-Madison, Friedlander had been inspired by President Kennedy to join the Peace Corps, but he had put the idea on hold until after law school. When asked where he wanted to go, “I said Africa because I figured everyone wanted to go somewhere else,” he says, remembering the application process. He was posted to Malawi, in southeastern Africa. Formerly the British protectorate, Nyasaland, the country had recently gained its independence, in 1964. “I had never heard of it. I had no idea where I was going,” Friedlander says.

In Blantyre, the main commercial and industrial center, Friedlander taught English in a secondary school and, working with the country’s director of sports, developed an extensive athletics program for the country, becoming the first secretary of Malawi’s Olympics and Commonwealth Games Association. Using his connections, he also helped build the Blantyre Youth Sports Centre, which Friedlander says for almost 40 years has continued to train some of Malawi’s top soccer and tennis players.

“The Peace Corps was the most fun two years of my life,” he says, “it threw me into another culture.” When his stint was up and he was offered a three year job as legal adviser in the Ministry of External Affairs, he jumped at the chance. He admits he knew nothing about international law, but adds that the government had a very good library. He was, by this time, not only in love with Malawi, but soon to be married to a Malawian. But when his contract expired in 1971, and even though he had several, other tempting offers in Malawi, his wife encouraged him to return to the U.S. After a four-month trip around the world they settled in Washington, D.C., where one of his friends from Harvard helped him find a job at the World Bank.

Although his work often took him back to Africa, he missed living there and in 1975 accepted a position as a banker in Kenya with New York’s First National City Bank (now Citibank). Friedlander analyzed credits, extended loans and did all required legal work to help African countries develop assets and create new jobs. In 1978 he joined Duncan, Allen and Mitchell, a U.S. law firm with two offices in Africa and helped set up an office in Nairobi. Within five years, he became managing partner in Washington. With the exception of his time at the World Bank, he had lived in Africa for about 13 years.

Other positions followed, including almost ten years with the Law Offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld where Friedlander expanded his career in private and public international finance, working on financial and business transactions in Russia, Central Asia and continuing in Africa. He opened Akin Gump’s Moscow office in 1994 and was managing partner there for three years. This stint, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was, Friedlander says, intense, exhilarating, exhausting, the best three years of his business life.

Now, Friedlander has formed his own business specializing in dispute resolution in Russia. Despite the bureaucracy he finds in Russia and the inherent challenges of dealing with legal issues in a complex legal and cultural context, Friedlander seems once again to be having the time of his life. “I’m driving this firm into new areas,” he says, adding that Moscow is one of the most exciting cities in the world, his colleagues young, dynamic and well-educated. “I’m sitting in the heart of the Soviet system, enthralled,” he says.

Friedlander returned recently to UW-Madison as a Distinguished International Practitioner. As a guest of the Division of International Studies, he spent a full week teaching classes and seminars, giving public talks about international finance, Russia, Africa (including Liberia), and meeting informally with students to discuss how to prepare for international careers. Although Friedlander didn’t major in international studies, he is now convinced that learning a foreign language and participating in a study-abroad or living-abroad experience are essential to prepare today’s students for an increasingly inter-connected world. “It gives them one more leg up on their competitors,” he says.

The little, picture postcard Swiss village of Nyon has a big reputation. Founded over two thousand years ago by Julius Caesar, it can lay claim to Roman ruins, a 16th century castle, and beautiful views of Lake Geneva. It can also boast it’s the home to Novartis Consumer Health, a division of the international health products company, and to Novartis executive and UW-Madison alumnus Ricardo Blank.

Blank never would have predicted when he was a UW-Madison student some thirty years ago that he would wind up here, heading the division’s medical marketing department. Back in Madison, Blank had his heart set on a career in America, but fate and his father intervened.

Blank (B.S. ’74, M.B.A. ’77) was born in Santiago, Chile, the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930’s. In Santiago, Blank’s parents sent him to a private school where he learned English. Closer to home, he conversed in Spanish with his friends, and German with his parents. His facility with languages would become a significant theme in his personal and professional life.

Blank wanted to study business but his father was convinced one didn’t need a degree in the field to be successful. After all, he had built his own cosmetics company, later sold to Proctor and Gamble, from the ground up. “Study something worthwhile like chemistry,” Blank’s father counseled. The two made a deal. Blank would get a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, then a master’s in business administration.

Blank had originally hoped to go to university in Santiago, but he says the election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970 made remaining in Chile impossible. “I knew what was coming,” Blank says, referring to Allende’s assassination and years of political repression. Blank packed his bags and left for the U.S. the day Allende was inaugurated.

Blank recalls that adjusting to life in America initially wasn’t easy. Americans looked physically different, bigger, he says, from people back home in Chile. He had never met Chinese- or African-Americans before. He also arrived shortly after the bombing of Sterling Hall and remembers National Guardsmen in the streets. On top of that, his engineering professor advised his freshmen students (there were no women in his class at the time) that only a third of them would stick with the program. “It was extremely tough,” Blank says.

Still, it didn’t take him long to get his bearings and become accustomed to American life. He lived in a dormitory, had a foster family who, he says, couldn’t have been more affectionate than flesh and blood parents, and, with time, found an American girlfriend, too.

He did well scholastically, and, as he was finishing work toward his M.B.A., started receiving job offers from U.S. companies. He says he was extremely marketable. Not only did he have a first class education at UW-Madison, his backgrounds in both chemical engineering and business were unbeatable. His language skills were also very valuable.

But, again, Blank’s father had other ideas. He wanted his son to consider Switzerland, where he and his wife had taken up residence after also leaving Chile. Although Blank could speak German he couldn’t write it, so his father offered to send a letter to the Roche pharmaceutical company in Basel, midway between his parents’ house in Lugano and his sister’s in Frankfurt, Germany. As Blank tells the story, while he was visiting his parents, Roche made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He returned to Madison to receive his M.B.A., reluctantly broke up with his girlfriend and moved to Switzerland.

The transition from America to Europe and from university life to the work world was as difficult as the one Blank had experienced years before when he left Chile. “It was an enormous culture shock, the fun years were over,” he says. At Roche, Blank was given broad training in all aspects of the pharmaceutical industry. Because he was fluent in Spanish, he was given responsibility for dealings with Latin America, meeting with Spanish-speaking visitors and handling regulatory issues with Spanish-speaking countries.

Other management jobs followed, first with Baxter Health Care in Brussels, Belgium, Pharmacia (acquired by Pfizer in 2003) in Freiburg, Germany, Ciba-Geigy in Basel, and finally Sandoz in Berne. In 1996, Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy merged to become Novartis, a world leader in the research and development of health products. (According to the company’s Web site, Novartis Group achieved sales of over 28 billion dollars in 2004, and employs over 80,000 people in 140 countries around the world.)

At Sandoz, Blank specialized in product development in medical nutrition. He says he enjoyed the opportunity to innovate – to design new concepts and products, develop new retail markets, establish good relations with important opinion leaders, and negotiate successful international contracts. Today, he travels the globe for Novartis, especially to Asia and Latin America, where the company is market leader in medical nutrition in Brazil.

Along the way, Blank became fluent in French, Italian, and Portuguese. Knowledge of six languages has made his traveling easier but it also has contributed toward improved communications at work. When Blank meets with his sales force in other countries, he is able to speak to staff in their own language. “They respect that tremendously,” he says. Nevertheless, he says English has become such a dominant language in international business that mastery of other languages is not as critical as it once was. More important is an understanding of other cultures. “If you want to work in an international environment, it’s key,” Blank says. If you aren’t sensitive to other cultures, if you don’t have “cultural understanding,” you won’t get the business,” Blank says.

Although Blank may not have realized it at the time, UW-Madison helped him prepare for an international career. By Blank’s own admission, the university welcomed him as a young man from Latin America and from a relatively protected background, and introduced him to another world. “The UW made me think, made me study, made me learn,” Blank says, but he adds it also encouraged him to be more independent, to know how to get along with others, and to be more mature.

UW-Madison also gave him a second chance at romance. Blank lights up when he tells the story. After 9/11, he found himself in Minneapolis on business, unable to fly back to Europe. He decided to head to Chicago to visit friends. On the way, he passed through Madison, unable to stop because he still felt guilty for breaking things off with his sweetheart many years earlier. In Chicago, with his friends’ encouragement, he located and phoned her sister and parents in Wisconsin, finally tracking her down. She’d received a Bachelor’s degree in political science and a J.D. degree, both from UW-Madison, and was practicing law in Colorado. After a 30-year separation, the two were back together again.