Find the time and money to visit multiple countries and the confidence to immerse yourself in different cultures with abandon – those are among the top tips offered up by three College of Business seniors who took part fall term in the Arthur Stonehill International Exchange Program.
Arseniy Goldberg studied at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. Elyse Hathaway’s exchange took her to DHBW-Mosbach in Mosbach, Germany, and Cristina Juarez Hernandez traveled to Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
The Stonehill program is a 30-year partnership that originally featured Oregon State, a university in Denmark and another in Australia. Named for the College of Business professor emeritus who spearheaded its creation, the program now includes a dozen overseas institutions.
Goldberg, a finance major, selected the Czech Republic as his destination primarily because the comparatively low cost of living would free up money for traveling to other countries and experiencing many cultures.
“I’ve spent most of my life in Oregon, and there’s a whole globe of different perspectives out there; when you go abroad, you see that,” he said.
At Mendel University, Goldberg studied international marketing, management, Czech law, European cultures and civilizations, and business economics. In his spare time he visited England, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.
Like Goldberg, Hernandez picked her study destination based in large part on a comparatively low cost of living. For example a huge dinner could be had, she said, for about $4.
“I was one of the few who could eat the really spicy food,” said Hernandez, who was born in Mexico and will graduate both with a Bachelor of Science (marketing major, Spanish minor) and Bachelor of Arts (business administration major, international business option).
While in Thailand, she took courses in international economics, international marketing, principles of international business, and brand and product management. Her class schedule was such that she was in school two days per week and spent a large chunk of her non-school days traveling inside and outside of Thailand.
Hernandez noted that the Thai have a slogan, mai pen rai, that defines their approach to living. It translates roughly to “no problem, we’ll just go with the flow.”
Hernandez’s adventures included riding an elephant, playing with a full-grown tiger and drinking whiskeys made from scorpions and cobras. In addition to Thailand, she visited Bali, Cambodia, Burma, Taiwan and the Philippines, and every culture she was in she made a point to “just live it.”
Hathaway, having grown up in a wine-oriented family in the San Francisco Bay Area, had hoped to find the Stonehill program included a university in France – it doesn’t – but happily shifted gears to Germany, which despite being known as a beer country has its own centuries-old wine industry.
Hathaway, who’ll graduate with a business administration degree with options in entrepreneurship and international business, studied an array of topics while at Mosbach, ranging from microeconomics to supply chain management to e-commerce. Most of the courses were of a one-week format – as in, for the week Hathaway was taking a particularly course, that course consumed the entire week.
“There was no carry over from week to week, so I’d travel during the weekends,” said Hathaway, who in addition to Germany spent time in France, England, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.
“The people were super nice,” she said. “They’d help with anything and understood that you were dealing with cultural differences.”
Such as, in Germany credit card use is discouraged, and “You don’t walk around in workout clothes,” Hathaway said. “People don’t do that there. So in order to blend in, you don’t go outside in sweats.”
For more on the Stonehill program, see http://business.oregonstate.edu/advising/international-business-option.
