January 2008.  I’m banging my head against the walls of the J-building of the Rotterdam School of Management, digging into my soul trying to figure out where do I fit in…

Months go by, several companies were appealing and I think I would have good experiences with them, but I didn’t want to have a good experience, I wanted a great one!!! I didn’t give up my job as an assistant principal in a nice school in America, sell my house, my two cars, and drag my wife and two kids across the ocean, dig myself into debt to pay for a great education and then settle again for average.  As one author put it, “good is the enemy of great!”.  And then, in a concussion driven evening (see wall reference above), Myngle crosses my laptop screen!

Education, check.  Entrepreneurial, check. In Europe, check.  Intercultural, check.  Authentic, check.

“Wow!  Where have they been????  Oh…. ok, they just started a year ago.  Ok, let’s check it out”

LinkedIn’s job posting was straightforward, informal, funny.  My response was the same.  One month later I’m sitting at one of their desks with the password to this blog.  Yes!

Now, here is what I get to do:  I get to reconnect with my previous environment, universities and schools, and share with them what Myngle can do to facilitate language learning in their settings.  The title attached to this gig:  Business Development Manager, Partnerships.  Fancy, uhm?  I had my first pitch yesterday and I didn’t realize it was a pitch until 5-6 hours afterward!  I just thought I was telling someone about the coolest new toy I just found on the web and how it could help them in particular!

To give some more insight into my life,  well this is all pretty new for me.  Ok, I do have some book knowledge, but this is the practice, and it’s a blast.  My previous working days were spent in school administration in the US, including university and high school.  I also did social work with youth and I tasted the “for-profit” world when I worked for Sunway (Benelux) a few years ago.

Also, I played a lot of basketball in my life, which defined my journey from southern Italy where my Dutch parents lived, to northern Italy (Brescia, to be exact), to the US, where I played in college for Lyon College in Arkansas.  That’s where I met my wife.  Six years later we made Little Rock our home (yep… Bill Clinton old stomping grounds) and four years later we moved to Holland… the land of my forefathers.  Ok, my parents…  After 15 months of business school, I’m ready to work.  I can’t remember being as excited about work as I am today.  Seriously.  This is a blast…

If you have any questions or you work for a school that wants to use our ever growing platform, let’s connect.  You can find me on Myngle’s pages or on Facebook (better) or email at stefan@myngle.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under Team. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.