A-Broadening Their Horizons
Honors-PLUS Tour Packs World of Meaning
into 'Global Business Economy'

A 32-day tour of Europe packed a world of meaning into the words "global business economy" for UC honors business students studying abroad this summer.

The undergraduate travelers didn't have to look far to see the lessons their teachers were hoping they would find. They were everywhere -even on a sweaty tram ride across Amsterdam. That wasn't some form of punishment, but a firsthand experience in alternative transportation. Touring an empty soccer stadium taught them why an electronics company would want to sponsor a successful "football" team and own a stadium. One of the most "student-friendly" stops, the Heineken factory, gave them an educational gulp of a high-volume production environment, as the classmates drank in the sight of 500,000 crates of beer, stacked and awaiting shipment within 36 hours.

In all, the trip took juniors in the Carl H. Lindner Jr. Honors-PLUS program to four countries, two universities, more than a dozen corporations and two major world institutions, NATO and the European Commission. From Aug. 9 to Sept. 10, the 20 undergraduate businesses students traveled to Tampere and Helsinki, Finland, the canal city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Brussels and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, plus Paris, France. Most of the students also ventured outside the trip's official itinerary, visiting nations on their own, such as Luxembourg, Estonia, Sweden, Italy, England and Greece.

Providing overseas experience was one of the primary goals of Honors-PLUS when it was founded just five years ago, under the leadership of Norman Baker, its founding director. Experience is the key word here, as the students quickly realized -- travelogues on TV and magazine articles just can't do justice to the real thing.

"Once you are there, once you've seen canals, once you've seen Grand Platz, once you've been up the Eiffel Tower, once you've ridden the Paris metro, once you've jumped in 58 degree water after being in a 195 degree sauna... that's when you really know what it is, and that's when you really know what is out there, and what the world is really like," said Joey Elam, information systems major. The sauna to which he refers proved to be one of the students' favorite activities on the whole trip. To their relief, the classmates were permitted to keep their bathing suits on for the sauna, even though Finns don't always do so.

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Scheduled visits.

STORIES FROM EUROPE

BEFORE DEPARTURE