After 3 months of squeezing in course work back in the hectic Winter of 2025 (and an examination that I had to complete while attending a kid’s birthday party at Fun Valley), I have (somehow) been admitted to the Chartered Institute of Arbitration (hello world, meet Mark Kawakami, MCIArb!). While this does wonders to combat my lingering insecurity, feelings of inadequacy and insignificance, etc. the whopping cost of earning this designation was about €2,220 (that’s €570 for the membership fee, €200 for the examination, and €1,450 for the course).
Before you start wondering whether this exorbitant cost was worth the return on investment, let me dig my hole a bit deeper: Last year, I also got accredited to be a certified mediator through the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR), which cost another €5,500 or so. The year before that, there was the Negotiation Mastery course that I took through the Harvard Business School, which (even for an 8 week online course) cost €1,700. So in the last year or two, I’ve racked up an invoice of almost €10,000 to (re)train myself in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution. (This doesn’t even include the cost of keeping my New York Bar registration active, but that’s another bag of headaches on its own).
But here’s the thing. I did not have to pay a dime of this out of my own pocket. This was because the Board of the Maastricht University Faculty of Law decided - a few years back - to allocate the Stimulus Grant that the Dutch Government distributed to the universities (back when Robert Dijkgraaf was serving as the Minister of Education, Culture, and Science) to almost every Assistant Professor at our faculty.
Thanks to their investment, I have been able to level up my competence and qualification from a mere international business lawyer to a more T-shaped lawyer (to borrow a term that was popular about a decade ago). Aside from the ego boost, their support and investment have enabled me to develop a new course on Conflict Prevention & Resolution to all second year students at our faculty, which is jam packed with knowledge and insights I collected through my education with CIArb, CEDR, and HBS. Through this course, we are able to teach students to not think like a lawyer, but to look for different ways of reduce the frequency, duration and the intensity of (their) conflicts.
The investment that has been made by the Dutch government and our Faculty Board continues to manifest in a variety of different ways: For example, I’ve also been able to direct the Maastricht Negotiation & Conflict Prevention Clinic in a more holistic and comprehensive manner, including but not limited to organizing conferences and workshops with renowned experts in the field of ADR right here in Maastricht. Through these events, we have been able to give students access to a wider network of ADR specialists (many of whom have been kind and generous enough to guide our students to better career paths).
So in short, this is what I want to say: In an era where everyone is seemingly trying to sell you something or trying to squeeze something out of you, being on the receiving end of someone investing in you and giving you time to grow feels amazing. It’s also something that motived me to want to be better, not only for myself, but for the organization that believed in me. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you to our Faculty Board and to those in government that continue to support us in (higher) education. Your investment has not, does not, and (likely) will not go wasted 💪