The Global Leadership Executive MBA, GL’16 cohort recently returned from its international study trip, a 10-day educational exploration in early June. They visited Kuala Lumpur, capital city of Malaysia, and Singapore, the island city-state off the southern end of the Malay Peninsula.
UT Dallas was never far from the group’s mind, as evidenced by the “Pink Bunny Suit Whoosh” pictured above. The class showed its Comet pride after suiting up to visit Texas Instruments’ Kuala Lumpur manufacturing facility. Class members posed outside the “clean room,” where semiconductor parts are produced in an environment kept free of airborne contaminants and pollutants.
“We were thrilled to don our pink bunny suits, go through the air shower, and tour the clean room,” the students relayed in their trip blog. “It was very interesting to learn how the process of die bonding and wire bonding works for the Cu and Au wires and see firsthand how the machines operate.”
The Texas Instruments’ tour launched the group’s professional visits. In Kuala Lumpur, those also included stops at Ericsson, the Central Bank of Malaysia Museum, where they learned about banking and finance in the Islamic world; Buffalo Tours, a travel company with a focus on Asia; the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism; Royal Selangor, a pewter manufacturer; and the Iskandar Regional Developmental Authority.
In Singapore, stops included the offices of DHL, the delivery and logistics company; TI’s warehouse and product distribution center; Bell Helicopter’s Asia Service Center, PSA, the operator for the Port of Singapore and the Abraaj Group, an investment firm.
“We chose these countries to compare and contrast an emerging marketing, Malaysia, with Singapore, one of the four ‘Asian Tigers,’ countries that have enjoyed economic prosperity and a high level of development,” GLEMBA Program Director Pamela Foster Brady said.
