Snjezana Stevic flips through a computer presentation about the Bosnian spa she represents.
Barton Glasser / The Herald
“Bosnia-Herzegovina has very nice tourism – many lakes, rivers, mountains, spas with the very hot waters,” the 20-year-old says as she glances at her American colleagues at the University of Washington-Bothell.
Then comes a chart showing the number of overnight stays at her 1,000-bed resort.
The first bar is high, showing 250,000 overnight stays in 1991. The next bar barely shows – plummeting to 13,000 in 1995. Business has slowly picked up since, with 82,000 stays in 2003.
Reflected in the chart is the bitter ethnic war from 1992 to 1995 that still affects Bosnia-Herzegovina’s economy, which had only just begun to emerge from the constraints of communism when the war began.
It’s why Stevic and other students from a private university in Bosnia-Herzegovina are in Bothell. They are working with students in a UW-Bothell business course on strategic plans for businesses, from juice companies to brick-making plants, that are looking to leave old state-run ways behind.
They leave for Bosnia-Herzegovina on Tuesday with some of the UW-Bothell students to present their plans to the businesses.
“There was war. We are now trying to revitalize our country,” said Gojko Rodic, 25, a Bosnian student. “So new experiences and knowledge will be good to have in the whole project.”
Patricia Kelley, an assistant professor of management at UW-Bothell, spearheaded the partnership after a visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina in April.
An alumna of UW-Bothell had invited Kelley to be a guest lecturer at Slobomir P University, a private institution that opened in 2003 near Popovi, a city in the Serb-led Republic of Srpska. Maja Misic, a Bosnian who took classes under Kelley, is now an administrative manager at the school.
“I said, ‘You know, they teach differently here,’” Kelley recalled. “If the professor shows up, he’ll read from the book he is assigned. They have one exam at the end of the semester, an oral exam, and you either pass or you fail.”
It’s an outdated European model from 40 years ago, she said.
So she asked the university’s president if she could teach a course involving both campuses that would involve a hands-on project. “I’ve been challenged from the very beginning,” Kelley said.
It wasn’t just the nine-hour time difference. It wasn’t just the language barrier. It wasn’t just the inconsistent Internet access that hampered communication between the teams.
It was also basic business concepts such as marketing, quality control, packaging and human resource management – things that didn’t matter under communism. “They don’t get it,” Kelley said.
They are the same roadblocks faced by Robert McGee, a professor at Barry University in Miami who two years ago helped train accounting professors at Bosnia’s public universities after the country adopted international accounting standards.
“They were very hungry to learn,” McGee said. “You didn’t have profits and losses. It was all new stuff.”
But McGee said the current generation of business students in Bosnia will have to overcome barriers beyond the basics.
Ethnic divisions still exist in the country. You can see it in beer halls, McGee said. Croats, Muslims and Serbs all have their own brews, “and they don’t sell to each other.” And a system of government that basically puts “three different countries under one flag” doesn’t help, he added.
Then there is the black market, a 40 percent unemployment rate and rampant corruption.
“The people are highly educated and motivated. They’re not lazy. But because of the corruption, people are afraid to invest,” McGee said. “And without investment, you don’t have economic growth.”
School leaders and students at Slobomir P University hope to change that. The university itself – the first private college in Srpska – was started by Slobodan Pavlovic, a wealthy American businessman of Serb origin.
“We hope to be the leading university in that part of Europe,” university rector Jovan Todorovic said.
Coming to UW-Bothell and taking part in the exchange has helped the school’s efforts to blend more Western styles of teaching and learning, Todorovic said.
Still, some of the students plan to return to Bothell – to enroll.
“The American diploma is more valued than ours. And I want to learn new things,” Rodic said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
