GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

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McLane College of Business brings global experience to campus. In the midst of all the limitations COVID-19 presented this past year, UMHB business professors have found innovative ways to bring the international business world to campus during a time when students couldn’t see the world.

Remote International Internships

Since international business students weren’t able to make their annual treks to places like England and Lithuania for the study abroad program, Dr. Michelle Reina arranged to make international internships available for students so they could work remotely with global organizations.

“We’ve had students doing international internships for the past few years,” explained Reina, who is a professor and study abroad coordinator for the McLane College of Business. “Since they haven’t been able to travel abroad for the past year, I wanted them to have an opportunity to gain some experience and build their resumes before graduation.”

Reina partnered with an agency called Kaya Responsible Travel that provides remote international internships. Students are placed with organizations abroad based on their area of study and interest, Reina said.

This semester, Sean Reid interned with Urban Life Edible Gardens & Landscaping in South Africa, which specializes in developing urban farming and landscaping for personal, business, and community use. His focus was helping with marketing, social media, and special projects. Madison Warner interned with VNP Group, the first and leading e-commerce group in Vietnam. Her project was focused on vatgia.com and designing a drop-shipping workflow for their large corporate clients. Abigail Johnson was placed with an organization in Morocco called The Voice of Amazigh Women, a women’s rights advocacy organization that works with women who suffer from discrimination. A typical week for the students consisted of a check-in meeting with the country director, a meeting with their supervisor, a cultural workshop to learn about the country’s culture, and a weekly chat with a person their age who lives in the country.

“They seemed to enjoy the experience!” Reina said.

Students “meet” famous meme creator

Dr. Jim King’s Culture and Global Business class was supposed to go on a study abroad trip to Morocco this year, but the trip was canceled. Thanks to Zoom, he was still able to treat his students to guest speakers from all over the world. This semester, King had about 20 speakers from several countries, including six from Morocco. One of the guest speakers was actually a student his 2007 study abroad class met during a trip to Morocco 14 years ago.

“I took a team of four business students to Morocco in 2007 to train Moroccan university students on how to support microenterprise development training,” explained King, who is a professor and graduate program director. “Three Moroccan university students were assigned to hang out with my four US students, and they became great friends.”

King was able to arrange for several of his students from the 2007 class to also be on the Zoom call with the Moroccan guest speaker. “It was the first time they had seen each other in almost 14 years, so it was pretty cool to see!” he said.

For his Global Social Enterprise class, King had some unique Zoom presentations, including Justin King, who works for Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and Jimmy Dorrell, the founder of Mission Waco/Mission World and pastor of the Church Under the Bridge in Waco.

“He talked about creating for-profit revenue streams in a not-for-profit organization,” King said. “We also talked about how COVID-19 has hit not-for-profits and social enterprises.”

One of his most notable guests was Nick Sawhney, the creator of a viral inauguration meme of Bernie Sanders that was widely shared on social media platforms.

Sawhney, an IT graduate student at New York University, experienced instant fame when he released a Bernie Sanders mittens meme generator.

“The big takeaway from this is that I got lucky with a really funny thing that people happened to like, which allowed me to escape the imposter syndrome," Sawhney said, explaining that the “imposter syndrome” is a sense that some people “don’t belong” in a particular industry which can make them second guess their ability and hold them back from pursuing their dreams.

Lithuania and UMHB

This past semester, Associate Dean for McLane College of Business Larry Locke offered an international business law class at UMHB in which half the students were from UMHB and the other half were from LCC, which is located in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Locke has been working for the last five years with LCC International University (formerly Lithuania Christian College) as a faculty member and research fellow.

“The provost at LCC and I came up with this idea last fall to offer this spring,” Locke said. “It is the first effort for us, but we are hopeful to repeat it in the future. My initial impetus was that we had business majors, especially international business majors, in our college who could not travel abroad due to COVID.”

All of the class meetings were on Zoom and were held synchronously at 8 a.m. for UMHB students, which was 4 p.m. in Lithuania. The students were paired into two-person teams for presentations and other group projects so that they got a chance to work with someone on the other side of the Atlantic. Students on the LCC side were from Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Nigeria.

“They did extremely well in the class, as did our UMHB students,” Locke said, even though there were several challenges to work through. Locke explained that LCC uses a different form of syllabus and learning management system. The university also had a different spring break, and their daylight savings time was two weeks after ours. Students also read from two textbooks (one from the US and another from the EU).

“Making the class look like one class to the students was quite a challenge,” Locke admitted, saying he often ended up doing a lot of work twice. “But just having the opportunity to hear each other’s questions and assumptions about the world was invaluable. They also became friends, and one of our UMHB students set up an online birthday party for one of the LCC students! In the end, McLane College of Business really brought the world to campus in a time when students couldn’t see the world.”