Everywhere They Turn,
Students Find A Lesson To Be Learned

When you're traveling through Europe, you don't have to look far to find lessons on the global economy and international business. They're everywhere, including on the airplane before you land in Paris.

They can even be found on a boat ride through Amsterdam's many canals. Or on a sweaty tram ride through city streets.

That's what 20 undergraduate businesses students are learning during a 32-day international study tour of Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

The traveling juniors are Carl H. Lindner Jr. Honors-PLUS Scholars in the UC College of Business Administration. Honors-PLUS, founded in 1996, requires students to complete an overseas practicum that actually takes them abroad and helps to pay for the expenses. This is in addition to the full-tuition scholarships each student receives for the five-year bachelor's program and the income students earn while working co-op jobs.

Before the scholars' plane landed on the runways of Paris a few weeks ago, the flight attendant made an announcement thanking them for flying with Sky Team. Later on as they visited KLM, the Dutch Royal Airlines headquartered in Amsterdam, a company executive clued them in on the global lesson to be learned from that short statement. Sky Team is one of four top airline alliances that have formed around the world since 1989. It includes Air France and Delta - the two airlines the students flew en route to Europe - plus Korean Air, Aero Mexico and CSA.

Mergers of airlines are not possible because of regulations in many countries that require airlines to have permission to fly into other nation's air space. So instead of mergers, alliances are forming. According to Ron Wunderink, the KLM senior vice president of corporate communications who made a presentation to the Honors-PLUS Scholars, KLM was the first airline to initiate an alliance, forming Wings Holding Group in 1989 and establishing partnerships with Northwest Airlines, Kenya Airways, Continental, Malaysia Airlines and Braathens.

The visit to KLM helped Honors-PLUS Scholar Pam Leist to see just how complex it can be to operate a global business. KLM has 130 aircraft flying to more than 137 cities in 67 different countries. In one of those countries, Nigeria, the airline works with more than 600 travel agents - 400 of them without phones.

"I liked learning about the intercultural aspects. I really have an interest in that," said Leist, a West Chester resident and 1998 graduate of Lakota West High School. She was especially intrigued by the way KLM works with people from Africa, India and other places.

Like at KLM, other corporate visits have introduced the students to new concepts - some of them not as complicated as airline strategizing. In Finland, the class visited Tamglass, a supplier of machinery for safety glass processing, and Nokia, the world's leading supplier of mobile phones.

Honors-PLUS Scholar Jay Hummel was surprised to learn that in Finland even the simple concept of the "coffee break" has a different meaning than back in the United States. "It's common for workers to take a 10-minute coffee break every hour in Finland. They drink an average of 22 pounds of coffee per person a year," said Hummel, a Bridgetown resident and LaSalle High School graduate.

Some of the most memorable lessons on the trip are occurring outside the corporate visits, when students are experiencing everyday life in a foreign city. The students endured at least one sweaty tram ride from the train station to their hotel in Amsterdam, because the tram is not air conditioned and only narrow windows in the top of each car can be opened. Most of the rooms in the students' hotel in Amsterdam are not air-conditioned, nor are most of the restaurants the students have been frequenting. That, combined with an unexpected heat wave Aug. 23-26, has provided a "hot" topic of conversation.

The non-corporate and non-classroom lessons can be among the most educational of the tour, says Raj Mehta, CBA associate professor of marketing who helped organize the trip and is one of the faculty members accompanying the students.

"It shows the students that everything is not the same as in the United States. It doesn't have to be a car to get you from one place to another." "It will help them to think without a straight jacket, it's teaching them flexibility," he added.

Some of the students learned the same kind of lesson taking a boat ride through Amsterdam's canals.

It might sound like an exercise in tourism rather than in business education, but the excursion allowed them to experience yet another mode of transportation in a city that boasts more canals than Venice, Italy.

Although the main purpose of the trip is for the students to learn about the global economy, Honors-PLUS director Norman Baker and Mehta have noticed another sort of impact. The students are becoming more savvy.

"The first day in Helsinki they were waiting for us to tell them how to get on the tram, and the second day they did it by themselves. Here in Amsterdam, they didn't even ask how, they did it by themselves the first day." Plus, the students are taking themselves without faculty assistance to local sites such as the Anne Frank Haus, the palace, the Van Gogh Museum and the nearby city of The Hague.

Mehta notes that the students also are learning a lot about themselves. "They are away from home, many of them for the first time, away from family. They are doing things they don't usually do by themselves," said Mehta.

In the process the students are discovering what they like and don't like.

Zach Osborne, an Honors-PLUS Scholar from Findlay, Ohio, discovered he might like working in an international environment, but he wouldn't want to work overseas for a long period of time. That's a lesson he couldn't have learned without traveling abroad and experiencing different cultures firsthand He realizes now that some of the conveniences of American life are hard to live without.