Sometimes the best way to study a developing country is to experience it firsthand
Going along for the ride definitely has its benefits. New York University student Erica Swallow figured she had nothing to lose when her freshman-year roommate invited her to attend an information session about a new program the university was starting in Shanghai. Living in China wasn’t something that Swallow, 19 years old at the time, had ever expected to do. An international business and marketing major, she had never been outside the United States and spoke barely a word of Chinese. But spurred on by her strong desire for a unique study-abroad experience, Swallow, along with 17 other students, took up temporary residence in Shanghai for the fall semester of her sophomore year.
Now back in New York, Swallow’s still got China on her brain. She’s added a minor in East Asian studies and plans to live in Beijing next summer for an intensive Chinese-language course run by NYU. “One reason I’m interested in China is that it’s changing so much. In the United States you don’t see that big change from one week to the next,” she says.
That kind of experience, says Sally Blount-Lyon, vice dean of the undergraduate college at NYU’s Stern School of Business, is the reason NYU opened its Shanghai outpost. The city is “a convergence point for the East and the West, for assets, for jobs, for new models of business. Our future sits in Shanghai, in many ways.”
Schools across the United States are developing programs and encouraging students — at both the undergraduate and graduate levels — to have a live-in experience in an emerging market. In the world of study-abroad programs, there has been a significant upswing in the number of students choosing to get schooled in “non-traditional destinations, and increasingly [in] non-English-speaking countries,” according to “Open Doors,” a report published by the Institute of International Education. In 2006, the report states, there was a 35 percent increase over the previous year in U.S. students participating in study-abroad programs in China. Also on the radar among the study-abroad set are Argentina (up 53 percent), Brazil (up 28 percent), and India (up 53 percent). Last year, those three cracked the list of the 20 most popular countries for U.S. students studying abroad.
So who’s sending them? Columbia Business School recently launched a student exchange program with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Brown University sent undergraduate students in its Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship program to India for internships last summer. And, through the Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, grad students are partnered with start-up companies around the world. MBA candidates spend a semester working with a company from the comfort of campus before heading abroad for an intense month on-site.
The time abroad forces students to take their noses out of their case studies and focus on the real business of emerging markets. “You hear [students] talk about developing a new understanding of the similarities and the differences,” says Julia Grant, associate dean for graduate professional programs at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. “They’re always quite struck by differences in styles and differences in attitudes.”
Community Business
Students who are interested in businesses working to benefit local communities while turning a profit are finding plenty of opportunities in emerging markets. Because of her interest in social entrepreneurship, Sloan MBA candidate Kathleen Poe says that studying in a developing country was a natural step for her. “In the developing world there’s a need for looking at ways that private business can also [work on] social issues,” says Poe, who worked with iViVu, a Hanoi-based company that is building an online travel site for visitors to Vietnam.
Another Sloan student, Anastasia Semienko, worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, with the Lapdesk Company, which, in exchange for advertising and socially minded public relations exposure, gets other companies to pony up the bucks to provide schoolchildren with badly needed desks. “A lot of companies are looking into ways that they can be more socially responsible and benefit the communities in which they operate. This is a company that has made that desire their business,” says Semienko, who believes it would have been nearly impossible to find a company in any first-world country so adept at combining business and social entrepreneurship.
Todd Frank, who is working toward a degree in international affairs at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, studied in Costa Rica for nine months as an undergraduate and spent the summer of 2006 in Panama studying carbon sequestration and carbon-offset projects. In some ways, he says, his experiences abroad taught him more than he could have learned in a classroom setting. “In the United States we’re used to everything working perfectly and having great infrastructure and everything being on time,” he says. “If you can overcome these things you have to overcome in these other countries, you can pretty much do anything.”
Opportunity and Credibility
While interest is growing in study-abroad programs in emerging markets, competition among applicants is fierce. Steven Gerken was the first student to push UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management to set up a partnership with the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore while pursuing his MBA at UC. The Indian university itself sees incredible competition among its own applicants — 150,000 apply and 250 are accepted.
After overcoming such odds, students tend to make the most of their experience. Case Western runs country-specific institutes that combine a semester of classroom study with intense 10-day trips to countries including China and, soon, India. It’s a pleasure to observe the students’ entrepreneurial spirit, says Grant. “You watch them gleefully looking around and cataloging ideas for businesses. [They] look around and simply see opportunity.”
That was clearly the case for Gerken, who has a PhD in biological sciences. Gerken developed his business, Avitacor, which manages clinical trials for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, while working toward his MBA. “When I tell U.S. companies about my business and that I would like them to consider [marketing] my product in India, and I tell them I lived there and studied there,” he says. “It just gives this [more] credibility. I’m not just an armchair Internet jockey.”
— Jenna Schnuer
Crash Course
Don’t have time to set up house abroad? You can start to build your knowledge of emerging markets closer to home. Dr. Prabhudev Konana of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin teaches a two-day course called Doing Business with China and India: Competing in the 21st Century. His goal: to help professionals stop focusing on the countries as threats and, instead, look at them as opportunities. “Growth in these countries is going to sustain for several decades,” says Konana. And, he adds, “the lessons you learn from India and China, you can apply them to other emerging economies. The issues are not going to change.” For more information visit mccombs.utexas.edu/execed/open/china-india.asp. — J.S.
