This piece is my final paper for the International Economics class I took while studying at Wake Forest University’s Flow House in Vienna, Austria. Admittedly, this course was an economics course by name only. Most of our class sessions consisted of field trips to local businesses, vineyards, manufacturers, and government organizations. Professor Martin Schwarz was light on lecture and heavy on happy hour; I remember being pushed to drink his favorite white wine during our final exam. Professor Schwarz provided only two directions for this assignment: it was to be eight pages in length and it was to refer to the concept of a SWOT analysis. From these instructions, I decided that I would follow the form of the course and write from the perspective of a business analyst. I chose to investigate the modern day funding schemes of classical music in Vienna. I aimed to address an audience that has some familiarity with business analytics but who had perhaps not written in the field themselves (much like myself).

I immediately discovered that I was in over my head. I had no experience with economics, business analytics, classical music, or European tax systems. This was a project that called for months of research into the tax records of Viennese charities, records that are, of course, written entirely in German. I decided to narrow the scope of this project and focus a large portion of the paper on just one recent packet of such documents. Soon, hours of Google Translate and sporadic use of my intermediate-level German began to produce meaningful analysis. This new scope did prevent me from producing any sort of normative claims about the system of funding but did not bar me from erecting a weak outline of how that system functioned. Reviewing the success of this piece from the perspective of a writer with another year of experience allows me to emphasize my writerly worries of overconfidence and unchecked ambition. These are issues that plague my writing to this day. I immediately regard any product that falls short of my initial vision as rushed or inadequate or otherwise illegitimate. This assignment encouraged me to charitably reconsider these assessments. A business analysis that cannot succeed on the grand scale that I imagined it to is not a worthless business analysis, rather, it is a piece that is reflective of my actual abilities and circumstances.