Moving beyond education

University of Dayton students pose with newfound friends in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

An important part of my responsibilities at UD is to lead a group of students to Asia every summer as part of a study abroad program. Along with my co-coordinator, Wesley King, we designed what we wanted to be the premier study abroad program offered to college students in the United States. Last summer marked the debut year for the Asia Study Abroad Program (ASAP), and this year, the program is once again back in Bangkok.

Although the program is primarily grounded in business school courses, an important aspect of learning to do business in Asia is understanding the cultural and religious practices of its peoples. To that end, the students enroll in an extensive class on Thai Buddhism as part of ASAP. The course is taught by Dr. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, better known by her ordained name, Venerable Dhammananda.

ASAP students on morning alms round with Venerable Dhammananda, the only fully ordained Theravada Buddhist female monk in Thailand.

Venerable Dhammananda runs Wat Songdhayakalyani, in Nakhon Pathom province, where she provides services for underprivileged girls. She spent almost thirty years as an academic at Thammasat University before leaving to pursue ordination. To date, she remains the only fully ordained female monk in the Theravada Buddhist tradition in Thailand. ASAP students are extraordinarily privileged to study with her.

As part of their coursework in Buddhism, ASAP students spend a cumulative week at Wat Songdhayakalyani. While there, the students follow the “temple life,” starting with a 4:30 am wake up call, morning chanting, breakfast (on some days preceded by morning alms round in nearby neighborhoods), classes and structured activities, lunch before noon, more classes, community service on temple grounds, dinner (taken without monastic staff who eat their last meals before noon), evening chanting and prayers, and an early night to bed.

The sight of thirty American college students meditating in prayer on the floor, or silently following Venerable Dhammananda on morning alms round, is unique indeed, and often solicits stares of curiosity from ordinarily unflappable Thais. As one reporter from a Thai language newspaper remarked, “these Americans know more about Buddhism than most Thais do”.

In addition to the Buddhism course, ASAP course offerings include Organisational Behavior, Principles of Marketing, Global Branding, and Global Competitiveness, the course I teach. The students begin their studies by examining globalisation and the effect of falling trade barriers on international trade. They study the issues facing the WTO today, such as increased use of antidumping duties and the concern over intellectual property rights protection. They look at regional economic integration and ASEAN. They examine methods used by businesses to undertake foreign direct investment, from simple exporting to establishing foreign subsidiaries, and everything in between.

(left to right) Becky Elkanick, Kim Grano, Andrea Schweitzer, and Sarah Selvig enjoy the view at Victoria's Peak in Hong Kong

ASAP provides the ideal classroom environment to study these concepts. The students begin their travels in Osaka, then travel to Hiroshima, Nikko, and Tokyo. They then head to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. From there, they establish their home base in Bangkok, and then travel to Hanoi, Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap for their first excursion. Their second excursion takes them to Yangon and Bagan in Myanmar. After a much deserved midterm break in Koh Samui, they embark on their third excursion, this time to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. A short weekend away to Chiang Mai marks the end of the formal semester. Before traveling back to Dayton, however, the students make one more entry into China, this time to Kunming, before heading to Lhasa and other parts of Tibet for one week.

The course of travel chosen for ASAP is intentional, and is designed to drive home one of the major themes the students study: “governments matter.” They begin in Japan, a modern industrialised country with the world’s second largest economy. By starting in war-rebuilt Hiroshima and visiting the Peace Park and Memorial Museum, they begin to grasp the role of their home country in shaping the fates of other countries.

In China, the students experience firsthand the eight hundred pound gorilla that poses unfathomable business opportunity as well as a potential threat to American hegemony – and they begin to understand what all the fuss about China is about. By visiting Hong Kong, they grasp the historical significance of British colonisation in Asia, drawing lessons about economic liberalisation and the effect it has on a people’s culture and values.

Santiago Petit, a senior Finance major, makes friends with a schoolboy in Siem Reap, Cambodia

In Thailand, they experience the warm hospitality of the Thais in a setting that still provides them with the comforts of home when they want it. In Vietnam, they are witness to strong economic growth from a former war enemy, and understand what it means to be on the losing side. In Cambodia and Myanmar, they see what decades of oppression and civil strife can do to a local population, and the desperation that occurs among human populations when the world, including the United States, turn away when their help is needed the most.

Finally, with their last excursion to Malaysia and Singapore, the students bring their observations full circle back to modernism and economic liberalism. As an added feature, the students travel to Tibet after their studies are concluded to see one of the most beautiful and remote regions of the world, as well as to compare the practice of Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism.

ASAP is run by the School of Business Administration, and as such, coursework is biased towards business courses. One of the most enjoyable parts of ASAP for me is being able to expose the students to real-life working executives based in the region. A student’s education in preparation for a career in business is simply incomplete without exposure to the people who make business happen every day. ASAP is designed to maximise that exposure.

The students this year have met with senior executives from Mazda Japan, Citibank Japan, Dana Japan, Corning China, Transnational China, NCR China, General Motors Shanghai, Brown Forman Asia Pacific, Microtec Vietnam, BVT Textile Hanoi, Ford Vietnam, Hagar Soya Cambodia, Yoma Bank Yangon, Goodyear Malaysia, Proton, and NCR Singapore.

In Thailand, the students learned about Thai culture and business practices from Dr. Henry Holmes, author of “Working with the Thais,” an essential part of any expatriate’s library. They met with Daniel Mitchell, CEO of SRP International, an investment and consulting firm that operates the largest private teak plantation in Southeast Asia.

They heard about the importance of giving back to the community through local sourcing whenever possible from Andrew Nathan, Managing Director of Starbucks in Thailand. They learned about the effects of avian flu on the poultry industry from Cargill (Sun Valley Thailand), and witnessed firsthand the positive effects of the automotive export industry by visiting Auto Alliance Thailand in the Eastern Seaboard Industrial Estate.

When we designed ASAP, we intentionally built in a strong service and giveback component. We wanted these future business professionals to understand that doing business in a developing country could bring more than profits to the companies involved – it could be a transformative catalyst for many impoverished towns and cities desperately in need of investment and jobs. It’s virtually impossible to teach this lesson in the classroom. Actually being in developing countries and seeing how people live and work on less than one dollar a day has a powerful effect on shaping the context in which students view issues such as globalization and international trade.

Prior to departing Dayton, the students connected with a non governmental organisation called “Room to Read.” Founded by a former Microsoft executive, the organisation’s goal is to build reading libraries in impoverished countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia. Through selling T-shirts and sponsoring a band at a local pub, ASAP students raised over $3000, more than enough to establish two reading rooms at a local primary school in Siem Reap province in rural Cambodia.

ASAP students visited the reading rooms during a dedication ceremony in June, and were treated as royal guests by the many hundreds of Cambodian schoolchildren. In addition to this formalised service project, the students spontaneously took it upon themselves to collect and raise money to purchase school supplies for yet another primary school, and to build eight wells in various villages around Siem Reap to allow families to have access to fresh water.

Before departing Dayton, many ASAP students had never been out of the country before (less than 10% of Americans have a passport). I knew I wanted to facilitate these students in their business education, but they had to take the first step by signing up for the program. To this day, I am in awe of the courage and sense of adventure it takes for someone who has never even been to neighbouring Canada to sign up for an adventure like ASAP.

Many tourists come to Thailand every year, stay for a few days at five star hotels, enjoy the spas and nightlife, and never leave the Skytrain route or Khao San Road. In order to truly transform these students, ASAP had to be long enough that the students would stop thinking of themselves as living in America. It had to travel to enough cities so that ASAP students would realise how vastly different the cities in Asia can be from each other. And it had to be filled with enough experiences that would supplement their business curriculum with other important lessons in life, such as how business can be positive force for change in local communities.

Has it worked? Unequivocally, yes. When I see a student establish an email pen pal relationship with a front desk worker at a hotel who makes less than a dollar a day, or when I see a student teach local schoolchildren how to play new games or to read and sharing the common language of laughter, or when I see a student wipe away tears when they think of the poverty they have seen, I know that these Americans are very different from their fellow countrymen.

When they arrive in Asia in May, they believe that they are very different from the people they meet in Asia. When they return in August, they realise that they are more similar than different than the people they have met, and that it is perhaps their friends and family who will seem like strangers to them.

The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote that if a teacher “is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” For me, being back in Bangkok again as part of ASAP (rather than as a visiting corporate executive) is the ultimate expression of that teaching philosophy. If I can lead a few students to the threshold of their own minds, transform the way they look at the world, their country, and themselves, then I am immensely satisfied. That, after all, is why I teach.