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Dean's Column

Trips Broaden Students' Horizons

by Garth Saloner

By the time you read this, I will have returned from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where I accompanied about 30 GSBers, mostly first-year MBAs, on their winter study trip. Note, I did not say I was "leading." Indeed, I am to follow. The trip is to be led by a second-year student team that arranged our meetings, planned the logistics, and prepared trip participants. I am their faculty advisor; more on what that means in a moment.

Every MBA student must visit a country in which he or she did not grow up nor have signif?icant work experience. Students can fulf?ill this requirement through a study trip, service learning trip, or a summer internship. The global experience requirement is the element of the new curriculum that has surprised me most in terms of its impact on the GSB.

What can you really learn about a country or region in just a couple of weeks? Well, it turns out, an awful lot. The leadership team invariably includes natives of the countries we are visiting. They know their way around, and their networks, augmented by Stanford's, result in a series of high-level meetings with business and government leaders, as well as for-profit and social entrepreneurs. On a trip to South Asia in 2006 we met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then-President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam of India, and then-President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. It probably didn't hurt that the latter's son was a first-year MBA at the time nor that the father of one of the trip leaders had been a classmate of the prime minister of India.

Most of the trips include heart-wrenching visits to neighborhoods where the daily struggles bear no resemblance to those that fill the pages of business school case studies. Visiting NGOs and micro-entrepreneurs in Kibera outside Nairobi, Kliptown outside Johannesburg, the suburbs of Cairo, or the inner-city slums of Mumbai leaves an indelible imprint on those students who have never before seen life at the bottom of the pyramid up close. An alum in private equity who was a student on a 2007 trip to Kenya and Uganda, where we studied microfinance under the tutelage of Kiva cofounder Jessica Jackley, MBA '07, then a second-year MBA, wrote to me recently that he is looking into a career in development. Coincidence? I doubt it.

As the information, images, and impressions rush at them, the students struggle to put them together into a coherent, meaningful picture. Conversations on the buses (between naps) and over meals are enhanced by more formal debriefing sessions in which students share their thoughts. This is where the faculty advisor is most helpful: linking observations to concepts learned in class, challenging the students to try to reconcile disparate viewpoints speakers have presented, or comparing experiences to those from other trips.

So why has the impact of this requirement on the GSB been so surprising? From my own study trip experiences, I knew the trips would have an impact on the students individually. But I underestimated the impact the trips would have in the classroom when students and faculty came back. Each student brought firsthand insights that greatly enriched case and class discussion. As an example, a few months ago I taught a case on Endeavor's decision about whether to expand to India, Egypt, or Kenya. In that second-year elective I was able to draw on experiences of students who had visited each of those countries on study trips, as had I. Beyond the classroom, these global experiences pervade the school as students share them with classmates and professors. In so doing, their horizons are broadened and their desire and ability to manage globally is enhanced immeasurably.