Pretty much everyone now knows I'm in grad school, but there's a lot of confusion about what I'm actually doing. Here's an answer, taken from a message to my brother:
School stuff is pretty cool - basically in this first year I'll be learning things that make me a Certified Hoity-Toity Badass, like the kind of stuff you hear discussed on CNN International or Bloomberg or Fareed Zakaria or in The Economist. I've already had to read up on the German election system. Once I've had all that stuff for a while (namely, a whole year), I'll be pretty well-educated on the things that make the world go round. You know how James Bond always understands the political and economic motives of his villains? That's why this place is jokingly called spy school. Next year I'll focus a bit more on some specific stuff, like mathematical thingies and more Japanese.
I'll be specializing in Management, which sounds gross, but at the grad level it's really not. It's not classes on synergizing this and core competencies that - in my case, it'd be the same math a World Bank-bound Economics specialist might do, but applied to individual companies. Microeconomic instead of macroeconomic.
And since this is so professionally oriented, I've already had career management training, so I've got a resume and I've even had training in stuff like hobnobbing and phone interviews. That's forced me to declare a direction for myself and my career, so I started saying "video games!" and people seem to be really letting me run away with it.
I'm starting to think Microsoft's games division is my dream gig - the Tokyo Game Show was just last week, and their showing there was big, even though Xbox isn't big at all over there. My Japanese, plus the Microsoft behemoth, all wrapped around games, might be the way for me to go.
I'll have to hobnob with some MS-employed alums from my program. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes.