In August 2018, Svetlana Dotsenko and Fabián Alejandro Poliak were visiting the Peterhof palace complex in St. Petersburg, Russia, when Mr. Poliak decided to make a move.
“I’m not leaving these grounds without trying for a kiss,” Mr. Poliak recalled thinking to himself.
A short while later, they were running through the palace gardens in a torrential downpour to catch the last ferry of the day back to the city center. “On the final bridge, I pulled her back,” Mr. Poliak said. “It was very beautiful.”
Ms. Dotsenko, 36, and Mr. Poliak, 35, first met at a party at Harvard in 2008. She was a sophomore from Voronezh, Russia, studying government, and he was a freshman from Buenos Aires studying sociology. Their interaction at the party was brief. Afterward, Ms. Dotsenko messaged Mr. Poliak on Facebook to ask if he would teach her Spanish. Mr. Poliak, “clueless” that the invitation was about more than learning a new language, wondered why she wouldn’t just take a class.
“He didn’t follow up, so we both completely moved on,” Ms. Dotsenko said.
Ten years later, Ms. Dotsenko was on the Greek island of Crete for a summer program that she runs annually as part of her business, Project Lever, which helps international students apply to top colleges in the United States and match with professors for research projects. She posted on Facebook that she was looking for a last-minute tutor for the students.
Mr. Poliak had just received an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and was traveling around Europe for four months before joining Tesla, where he still works now, as a program manager.
Mr. Poliak answered Ms. Dotsenko’s post, and she hired him immediately. “The program was very intense,” Ms. Dotsenko said. “It was no place for romance.”
