Study tours abroad by MBA students often entail an essay about their experiences, a scrapbook or photographs at the most. However, it is different at University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.
Research by the Carlson Global Institute had revealed that studying abroad imparts invaluable benefits to future business leaders by way of strengthening their ability to navigate unfamiliar situations, work effectively on cross-cultural teams and much more.
Two of the school’s faculty members have created innovative models to facilitate students to engage with the world around them in new ways.
Thus, instead of assigning a typical essay to summarize their experience abroad, Senior Lecturer Seth Werner challenges students to reflect on and codify their key learnings into whatever format best expresses their interests, talents, and passions.
The net result is that over the years, students have come with comedy skits, created paintings and collages, written letters to past professors and loved ones and even cooked meals.
“If students know at the outset of the course that they want to do a scrapbook, suddenly it becomes a collective process throughout the experience, instead of a summary process at the end. I think it deepens the experience because they’re being purposeful,” he says.
Thus, Carlson students have visited China, UAE, Chile, and Argentina. The projects may take nearly any form, as long as they convey how the student connected their international experience to their personal perspective, to their outside experiences or to the site visits.
Werner says during an exam, the students’ penning their experiences would be momentary. “But if it’s a project that has meaning to them, it makes the entire experience more long term and they’ll carry it with them.”
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Senior Lecturer Steve Spruth uses the city as a classroom to encourage students to immerse themselves in a host country.
The students are encouraged to visit local businesses and learn about how the products, pricing, customers, and other factors differ from retailers in the United States. Then the class reconvenes to discuss their interpretations and analysis.
Besides providing grounds to develop empathy for the local culture, it encourages students to move beyond standard site visits, he says.
The school’s full-time MBA students get exposure to the global business climate through short-term Global Enrichment trips and a capstone International experience.
During the International Experience, students are divided into cohorts and spend two weeks travelling with Carlson School faculty to engage in comparative analysis of global business settings.(Image Source:google.com)
