At the beginning of each semester, our Global Executive MBA students have a weeklong “intensive” on campus, after which the remainder of the semester is offered online. At the beginning of the third semester, instead of coming to the UT Dallas campus, our students meet our faculty an international campus. This year that meeting took place at the SKEMA Business School on the northern border of France, in Lille. Lille is located between the financial centers of London, Brussels and Paris. Our students kicked off the semester with Global Economics, with Dr. Dominique Jolly from SKEMA; Cross Culture Management with Dr. Lorthar Katz from Berlin; and International Corporate Finance with Dr. David Springate and Global Politics with Dr. Clint Peinhardt, both from UT Dallas.
Each day our students had lunch with the SKEMA EMBA students, who hailed from France, Norway, Lebanon and Sweden. One evening, the Lille Chamber of Commerce shared its vision for Lille and hosted a reception for us afterward. At the end of the week, after four days of class, we boarded a bus with the SKEMA students and drove to Brussels, to meet with various organizations within the European Commission. We visited the European Parliament and the European Commission in the afternoon. We heard a talk by Norbert Wunner, an expert on “Economic Challenges in an International Context.” Fernando Andresen Guimaraes, directorate general for economic and financial affairs, spoke about the “Countries of the G-20 and IMF.”
The international retreat serves to blend classroom learning with the cultural exposure of an international country as students kick off their global track within the GLEMBA curriculum.
