MBAs Abroad: The New Normal?

TURBOCHARGING YOUR NETWORK

What makes abroad experiences such career-boosters? According to Davis-Blake, employers see a willingness to go abroad as a sign of flexibility. Shaw says it demonstrates an ability to work in diverse teams. She adds that it’s becoming assumed that if you’ve gone to a top school, you’ve had some kind of international exposure, even if that exposure didn’t specifically involve traveling to other countries. And if you want to work abroad after your MBA? International experience is practically a requirement. Through the joint efforts of school and student groups, students at Johnson have even gone abroad specifically to look for jobs, Shaw says, naming Hong Kong and China as past destinations.

On top of that, going abroad turbocharges one of the most important components of the MBA package: access to a wider network. “The global MBAs are basically trying to multiply their data points on the map,” Guillotin says. Those connections can be professional or personal—it all counts. “They widen their networks substantially in terms of the other globally connected future business leaders that they get to meet,” Shaw adds.

“I AM SURPRISED THAT WE DON’T MAKE IT MANDATORY HERE”

If going abroad is so valuable, are schools going to begin making it a requirement? “I am surprised that we don’t make it mandatory here, to be honest with you,” Guillotin says. He explains that Fuqua’s approach to education is more liberal than prescriptive, and that if the abroad requirement were to be more than two weeks long, the school would lose out on certain kinds of students—students with families, for example. Still, he notes that the Yale School of Management made it mandatory in 2006, a move which seemed pretty sensible to him. (As a Thunderbird alum, he admits he’s biased.)

Yale might have been the first elite business school to make going abroad that big of a priority, but Harvard Business School and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business—#1 and #2 in the MBA game—have followed suit. As part of a required course, Harvard sends its first-years to emerging markets, and Stanford lets students choose between a number of options ranging from internships abroad to projects with foreign companies.

Venturing outside the country is mandatory for only some Johnson MBAs. Students enrolled in the three-semester MBA program at Cornell Tech, the university’s New York City outpost, will participate in a required trip to Israel in January. It’s fitting, since Cornell Tech is actually a partnership between Cornell and the Technion­–Israel Institute of Technology.

TRAVELING ON LOANS

There’s a caveat to all that eye-opening international experience: It’s expensive. Of her trip to China, Nelson wrote, “financially, I’ll be paying for all of this for a long time.” Guillotin says that at Fuqua, money isn’t an issue if you’re comfortable borrowing. Shaw also brings up the loan option, adding that the school can also help support MBAs through alumni-funded sources and funding that’s available for international internships.

In many cases, deciding whether to go abroad is a matter of deciding whether the experience is worth the debt. So far, the answer seems to be a resounding “yes.”

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