2009 Germany-Switzerland Study Tour

Every Study Tour team includes student leaders, a faculty representative, and the assistant director for MBA Global Programs in the Global Business Center (GBC).

Student Leaders: As the tour’s “resident experts”, student leaders manage all group tour logistics, organize the company visits, set up cultural activities, and contribute some content for the pre-departure sessions (IBUS 570).

Stacy Gary

Stacy has accumulated almost a year’s worth of time traveling and working in Europe, covering 14 countries and experiencing many interesting situations. Furthermore, Stacy understands trip logistics well. In 2005, Stacy was a professional tour guide leading groups of 15 to 65 people on tours throughout destinations in Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Italy, Paris and the UK. In addition, Stacy has a master’s degree that focused on Intercultural Communication.

Veena Prasad

Veena is very familiar with Germany and Switzerland. She lived in Germany for 2.5 years and in Switzerland for 2 months but traveled there often. She speaks German which should come in handy. In her life before the MBA, Veena was a Project Manager at Procter & Gamble in Cologne, Germany. Veena has lead informal tours. Most recently in 2007, she took her family and friends from the US, Japan and Switzerland on a tour of her native state of Karnataka in South India.

Faculty Representative: Study tour faculty have several roles:

1. Create educational content for IBUS 570 and award academic credit for the course.
2. Serve as official UW representative on the tour.  Having a faculty member lends credibility to the tour to overseas companies, especially in countries where a social hierarchy is an important cultural value.
3. Work with student tour leaders to coordinate and implement an emergency response plan should an emergency of any kind occur.  This includes alerting GBC staff.
4. Learn alongside graduate students.  Faculty are often selected for tours because they have no previous experience with the destination.  What they learn on a tour provides invaluable educational insight that they pass along to their future students.
5. Provide program continuity through long-term institutional knowledge.  The Study Tours have been around for over a decade, during which time hundreds of students and a handful of staff have left UW while faculty turnover is much lower.

Mary Ann Odegaard

http://bschool.washington.edu/faculty/faculty_detail.asp?ID=62

Jenn Adrien in the Global Business Center is the manager for the Study Tour program.  Her responsibilties cover all administrative and managerial roles for all the tours as a whole, from selecting and training the Study Tour leadership teams to evaluating the program’s impact on cross-cultural learning, from running the lottery to helping teams establish in-country contacts and manage their budgets.  Jenn has a B.A. in French and a M.Ed in Counseling.  She joined the GBC in January 2006, since which time she has overseen 15 Study Tours and even participated in one.  Jenn’s favorite thing about Study Tours is the knowledge that participants will carry meaningful memories from their tours for the rest of their lives.