From the Director of Admissions: Going Global

As we enter the second week of spring break here at Yale SOM, the school’s global aspirations are on full display. Last week was the third installment of Global Network Week, a major program of the Global Network for Advanced Management, of which Yale SOM is a founding school and a driving force. Over two weeks this month, 470 students from 12 different Global Network schools will take courses at other member schools around the world. Yale SOM students traveled last week to Turkey, Japan, Spain, Israel, and China to learn about diverse topics including the origins and implications of the euro crisis, innovation in Japan, and the ins and outs of doing business in China. At the same time, students from network schools in those countries (Koç, Hitotsubashi, IE, Technion, Renmin, and Fudan) traveled to New Haven to learn about behavioral economics, finance, and marketing from our faculty. Next week, Yale SOM students will travel to EGADE in Mexico, FGV in Brazil, Seoul National University in Korea, INCAE in Costa Rica, and Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, while students from those schools come to Yale for a course on alternative investments, including commodities, real estate, and private equity.

While these two Global Network Weeks are happening, our first-year students are traveling for their International Experience courses. These faculty-led seminars take groups of students to destinations around the globe to meet with top business, government, and societal leaders. For example, the trip to India, led by Senior Associate Dean Anjani Jain, includes visits with 15 leaders, including the founders of Infosys and Janaagrah; the CEOs of Genpact, Hindustan Unilever, Godrej Group, and ICICI Bank; and the governor of the Reserve Bank of India.

You can get a quick snapshot of students’ global experiences by visiting our Tumblr page, which is being updated throughout the course of these busy weeks with photos and stories.

Given the many global opportunities that exist at Yale SOM, the school will next year replace the first-year International Experience requirement with a broader Global Studies Requirement (GSR) that students can complete at any time during their two years at Yale. Students can satisfy the GSR requirement by participating in one (or more) of the following: the International Experience, Global Network Week, Global Network Courses (online courses that enable you to work with a global team to look at a cross-national business problem), the Global Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship courses (through which you can do project-based consulting work with organizations in other countries), or a semester of study abroad.

I hope you’ll learn more about these programs and how they can help you prepare for a career in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.