Global Business Experience

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This Global Business Experience (GBE) course is for students from the McDonough School of Business and the Walsh School of Foreign Service in the Global Business Fellows Program. It is a senior-level course taken in the spring semester. It includes teaching and learning in international business topics oriented to applications to real current business situations. Prerequisites include the three courses in the Business Core and the four courses in the Economics Core of the Global Business Fellows Program. A defining feature of the course is consulting projects taken up by teams of students in the course. The projects are typically based either on a particular organization’s business issue or a global industry’s issue to be resolved. Consulting projects are developed by the faculty in conjunction with the sponsoring organization and supervised in periodic team meetings of the student with the faculty member directing the GBE course. This course includes a foreign residency week during spring break mid-way into the semester. The foreign residency week is planned to take place at ESADE in Barcelona, Spain. A primary activity of the foreign residency week is field research undertaken on behalf of the consulting projects. The week’s activities also include lectures and case studies, field visits, joint student interactions, and cultural events. The objectives of the course are: (1) to increase your understanding of business in a foreign setting; (2) to increase your ability to conduct international business with comfort and confidence in foreign culture, and to improve your managerial mobility – your ability and willingness to do a job wherever it needs to be done; (3) to improve your problem-solving ability, analytical skills, skills of synthesis, and communication skills; (4) to deepen your understanding of international business, macroeconomic, and business-government relations issues applied to the specific country situations; and (5) to provide an opportunity for you to integrate knowledge from prior courses and apply it to the solution of a real current business problem.