Business [language]

I just had my last class of Business Arabic. It's very strange that this important (time-consuming) aspect of my study now all of a sudden disappears. Like it was strange to just study Political Science during my last year at Leiden University.
It was great to have the opportunity to be challenged by a high-level applied language course, learn a lot of useful vocabulary and learn about (business) practices in different countries. I think that it's very important to study the application of a language in real-life in order to get a good grip of what the language is all about. Just studying grammer and vocabulary doesn't do it for me. The plans of Prof. Esseesy, head of the Arabic department and my professor for the past semester, to launch applied Arabic courses tied to a certain class such as International Affairs or Security Policy sound like a great idea to me. This approach is the most important difference between my experience here at the George Washington University and in Leiden. In Leiden, it seems like the professors ask: What can the student do that will benefit academics? while at GWU, they ask: What can academics do that will benefit the student?
Because I don't aspire an academic carreer, the last approach appeals more to me: how can academics be used to contribute to the personal developement of students? While it is important to invest in academic research, because only a small portion of university students end up in academic careers, I don't think the general focus of a curriculum should be research. Instead, it should be to offer a wide range of opportunities to gain insight in a specific field of study, combining several disciplines, languages and educational methods. Combining those aspects in one class - such as Business [language] - sounds like an great idea to me. Therefore, I hope that the Japanese department at Leiden will one day re-establish their course in Business Japanese - or Political Science Japanese, or Anthropological Japanese. I was lucky enough to take a course about Japanese Fascism with Prof. E. Mark in my last year of Japanese studies. There we used Japanese texts to study the political and military environment in Japan during the Second World War. This not only offered new insights in the field - Japanese scholars tend to have a different view on the subject, in fact, they are more prone to call the WWII regime in Japan fascist than many western historians - but also forced me to read academic Japanese, learn new vocabulary etc. It connects the language to a real-life situation.
I'm very much looking forward to applying Arabic in the real-life situation of Al Majmoua. In the end, the only way to really learn a language is to live in a country where it is spoken. So that's what I'm going to do.