Its Friday morning, and while I sit here catching up on the latest in enterprise architecture methodologies while waiting for deliveries, I wanted to reflect for a moment on my first two days at business school.
The sheer diversity, both in heritage, ethnicity, and experience is staggering. A Japanese track classmate has already lived in Japan for three years as part of the JET program. One student has traveled to over 41 countries and the closest runner-up, 40. There is a Belgian gentleman in our cohort that has learned 7 languages, while yet another has spent a year and a half teaching english in South America. Still many more come from such diverse backgrounds as Peace Corps volunteers looking to excel in micro-finance and, presumably, take those still back to such countries for good use. Another, a Blackhawk pilot, putting his focus on the middle east.
Most MBA programs may give you a global curriculum geared to bringing you up to speed on varying accounting methods or global dynamics and responsibility, and this program has all of that. But I have yet to see any other MBA program with the type of diversity in the student body that I can see here …and that is what I am truly excited about.
So as I lay flat on my back in the pool unwinding from my first day of orientation and career management planning (yes, we start this before we even begin classes), the majority language being spoken in this aquatic environment was not English, but German. I was the American/English minority, here in South Carolina.