In this article
- Learn about Kelley Direct’s global immersion experiences, which are uniquely designed to put your skills to work and change your perspectives on business. It’s one of the many reasons we’re ranked among the best online MBA programs offering international business by U.S. News & World Report.
- Hear from faculty who have thoughtfully planned and led international immersions. They share their perspectives on the importance of in-person international business experience for online MBA students.
- Find out how Kelley Direct Online MBA graduates have applied the skills and cultural awareness they gained through studying and interacting with businesses in another context to their careers at home.
Interested in an international online MBA program? Kelley Direct’s global immersions take students all over the world—including Greece.
Global immersions provide an opportunity to travel internationally to gain real-world business experience as part of an international business online MBA focus. How do you fully immerse yourself in a country’s corporate landscape and culture?
You go there.
Each year, Kelley Direct’s full-time faculty design and teach more than 12 optional global and domestic immersions that center on a topic that prepares students for the complexities facing businesses in an interconnected global economy. These trips take Kelley Direct students to business hubs throughout the world, including Thailand, Ireland, Greece, and Brazil, and provide one-of-a-kind opportunities.
Professor Tatiana Kolovou, pointing, led a global immersion to Greece, her native country.
In 2022, Tatiana Kolovou, a professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School, led a group of students from the Kelley Direct Online MBA on a trip to her hometown of Athens for a unique opportunity to consult with the Olympic Athletic Center of Athens and to experience the nuances of Greek business culture firsthand.
“We want students to learn or enhance their cross-cultural competency,” Kolovou said. “This includes walking into a room and getting a sense of how to make a business request, understanding power distance, and understanding the formality that may exist in some cultures. Cross-cultural competence also encompasses how to run a virtual meeting, how to communicate face-to-face, and how not to show up to places empty handed.”
About the program: Kelley Direct’s global immersions
Kelley Direct’s optional global immersions offer students who are interested in international online MBA programs the opportunity to pair their online studies with in-person, global experiences. Students study a country’s economy, history, infrastructure, finance programs, and politics, and then visit that country with a Kelley School of Business faculty member and other Kelley Direct students.
What makes Kelley Direct’s global immersions particularly unique is that they’re planned by a full-time faculty member, who tailors each experience to align with the learning objectives for the chosen immersion theme. For example, a recent trip to Dublin looked at and visited a number of high-performance organizations including Teeling Whiskey, IDA, and Google, while the group visiting Athens focused on the Athens Olympic legacy and 2004 Olympic facilities. The Athens project was divided into six different topics that students could research, including engaging the local community, bringing in athletic tourism, and leasing out the space for conferences and workshops.
Kelley Direct students studied and visited top companies, including Google, during their immersion in Ireland.
In some of the programs, groups make multiple company visits, gaining a broad understanding of the ways that different businesses operate in that culture. Other groups work specifically with one or two companies in the city that they visit, completing a consulting project as a way to pair their previous business knowledge with a new understanding of the country’s culture.
“All of our business professionals may have a strong acumen of business analytics, business operations, or any other of their specialty areas, but they may not have seen this in action in a different continent,” Kolovou said. “We help them learn how to ‘read the room’ when they go to a different culture and interact not only with professionals or students of their own years, but most importantly, people who are in the industry and are in a professional program.”
Kelley Direct Faculty Chair Will Geoghegan, center, talks to students during an in-person event on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus.
Learning about and visiting different countries gives students the opportunity to see business environments and cultures that are different from their own, or to better understand the nuances that distinguish a similar culture. Will Geoghegan, chair of the Kelley Direct Online MBA Program and a professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, led a group of students on an immersion to his native country, Ireland, in 2022.
“Although we [Irish] are European, we see ourselves in a very American context,” Geoghegan said. “A lot of large organizations have created their EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) headquarters in Ireland, so we could have a similar trip in Silicon Valley, but it adds a little more context and a little more depth of understanding when you are looking at a different country’s application.”
“I know that our Kelley Direct students have families, work, and side businesses,” Kolovou said. “When they have an opportunity to spend time together for a week focusing on one important project, it becomes such a magical time to connect with them and do things with them like dinners, going on walks and runs, visiting clients, and experiencing the liveliness of Athens together.”
Student perspective: The practical nature of getting to know another culture
One of the main objectives of the international business experience in the Kelley Direct Online MBA Program is to increase cross-cultural competency, and the preparation for the trip and the trip itself are both designed to help students learn how to engage with an international business environment.
Alex Cole, an August 2023 graduate of the Kelley Direct Online MBA program who went on an immersion to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is a senior regional director at Cincinnati Insurance Companies. In his role, Cole works with broker agencies and helps grow the New York City territory’s sales strategy. During their time in Brazil, Cole and his classmates saw a new kind of corporate culture as they visited companies from a variety of industries.
On their last day of the trip, groups of students gave a presentation to a medical provider that wanted to expand not only in Brazil but to other countries within South America. Students looked at the best proposal for the provider to expand, offering suggestions for the country to target based on culture, number of doctors, population demographics, and business opportunities.
“The greatest impact for me—from both a personal and professional standpoint—was understanding cultural differences,” Cole said. “We saw what we studied come to fruition in those meetings as we applied not only our business and MBA experience but the cultural research we completed before the trip.”
Cole lives and works in New York City, and he was particularly struck by the slower-paced interactions and intentional way that people in Brazil built relationships with the students from Kelley and with each other. Studying these differences helps him in his work in New York, he said, where he interacts with people from different cultures on a daily basis.
“New York is very fast-paced,” Cole said. “Our associates in Brazil really want to spend time investing in you as a person, to more slowly build a relationship before they even begin to do business with you. There are so many cultures here, so a lot of what I learned in Brazil can be applied to the way I interact with people from other cultures at work and in my personal life.”
Student perspective: Gaining real-world experience for career advancement
In addition to increasing their cross-cultural competency, Kelley Direct students can develop professionally by choosing a global immersion with a topic that aligns with their current or future career plans.
Rahul Patel, a fall 2023 Kelley Direct graduate, visited Bangkok, Thailand, in an immersion in 2022. Patel chose the Kelley Direct Online MBA Program in part because of the opportunity to participate in a global immersion, and he was glad that he went to Thailand both because it was such a unique experience and because the trip’s topic was professionally relevant for him.
The theme for the global immersion in Bangkok was sustainability, which aligned with Patel’s current position as a product manager and product owner for Xylem, a technology provider for utility and energy companies around the world.
“The immersion was all about sustainability and technology, and using technology to promote these ideas,” Patel said. “We looked at how various organizations incorporate sustainability into their business practice, from the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company to nonprofits, to everything in between.”
The immersion to Bangkok visited a non-governmental organization that’s funded by the royal family of Thailand, the Thai Stock Exchange, a plant-based meat factory, and the Thai Union Group, one of the largest seafood producers in the world.
“The organizations that we met are definitely thinking about sustainability with a more daily mindset,” Patel said. “In my work, we get caught up with very tactical things that we have to finish or accomplish, and sometimes you don’t step back to see the impact. The people we met looked more broadly at the impact sustainability practices could make.”
Students during the global immersion in Ireland
Networking in action: Building relationships offline
Students in our master’s in international business online program who participate in global immersions don’t just spend all day in a conference room. In Bangkok, Patel and his classmates went to local markets, tried eating scorpions, and interacted with elephants. These shared experiences create strong relationships between students and faculty.
“It was great to step out of my comfort zone and go by myself to Thailand with 20 people who I didn’t know before,” Patel said. “By day two, we were all joking and talking. Doing that helped give me more confidence in approaching new settings and groups of people.”
Geoghegan similarly noted how global immersions, which are designed to push students outside of their comfort zone, help foster connections between students and faculty that are harder to create online.
“We can have deep connections over Zoom, in breakout rooms and office hours, but it’s tough to replicate what it’s like to see someone in person,” Geoghegan said. “The connections I make with students tend to be the strongest when we’re having a drink and discussing the company visits we had earlier that day, or when we’re having a coffee and walking to the company visits.”
During his immersion experience in Brazil, Cole met other students who he still talks to and spends time with in person today. This in-person, extended interaction with students and faculty through the global immersion helped solidify the relationships and knowledge that he gained through Kelley, which he said is not always a guarantee for an online MBA program.
“With online programs, you’re the one controlling how much you learn,” Cole said. “The faculty at Kelley does a great job of facilitating interactions and learning development as a whole with in-person events and global immersions.”
Professor Tatiana Kolovou takes a photo of a Kelley Direct student at the Acropolis in Athens.
Patel also noted that the in-person global immersion was a highlight of his time as a Kelley Direct student.
“The quality of people who are in the program speaks for itself,” Patel said. “The way the program is set up, not only is it flexible, but they also set up in-person opportunities to really form connections in your network. The people that you’ll meet and interact with through the international immersion experience, the companies and the professors who coordinate the trip, make it really worth it.”
Learn more about global immersions as part of the Kelley Direct Online MBA. You can also reach out to our team to see if an online MBA in global management is right for you.