Thomas, who took the Professional MBA course at the Washington DC-based school, spent a semester studying abroad in Bangalore, India on a $3,500 grant. His trip centered on “life-changing” research into the state of entrepreneurship in the Indian state of Karnataka.
“There’s lack of resources and then there’s pretty substantial difference in understanding of what entrepreneurship is,” Thomas says. “In North America, we tend to think of tech start-ups […] and then in India, entrepreneurship can mean being an entrepreneur out of necessity.”
While in India, Thomas’ courses were led by a GWSB faculty member who held class in a conference room adjacent to his hotel. As part of GWSB's flexible, part-time Professional MBA program, Thomas took courses both in the US and abroad that honed his skills in teamwork, critical thinking and judgment.
These classes, along with the overall experience of daily life in an exotic country, helped shape Thomas’ opinion of what success means to people in a global context.
“Indians are a wonderful people, a spiritual people,” he says. “It’s just an amazingly different country from the US.”
Thomas also found the India trip runs through everything he does now, particularly when analyzing how different cultures interact with one another in a business environment. Back in the US, the Professional MBA, which is comprised of almost 10% international students, also trained Thomas how to succeed in a globalized workforce.
He adds that studying abroad in India—coupled with the low cost of living in the country—was actually more cost-effective in many ways than going to school in the United States.
After his time in Asia, Thomas completed his degree and then entered into an associate director role at GWSB’s World Executive MBA program. While there, he led trips with Executive MBA students from the school to destinations like Estonia and Greece.
The Estonia excursion was particularly memorable for Thomas. He took a diverse, mid-career Executive MBA cohort to study cyber security at a NATO center in Tallinn.
“You had quite a wide spectrum of students in terms of their ability to travel and the different experiences that they brought to the class,” he says. “You had students coming from federal contracting, you had coming straight out of the military, […] students who had worked in corporate accounting for twenty years.”
The cohort also had “top-level access” to government officials and institutions in the country. For Thomas, the close-up view of Estonian diplomacy revealed an industrious side to the eastern European nation.
He was especially impressed by “what they’re able to get done, in terms of citizen services [and] data security.”
The Tallinn trip, plus another section of international travel to emerging, forms part of the executive MBA program at GWSB. Those trips are included in the students’ program fees.
In the past, these trips have gone to countries like Turkey and Greece. This year the Executive MBA group is off to Sri Lanka.
From Asia to Europe, Thomas has seen much of the world through his time as both a student and an administrator at GWSB. He says GWSB has connected him with a network of professionals from a number of different cultures, and at varying points in their careers.
Thomas recently left the school, and joined up with an ex-GWSB student to help drive the development of Boone Group, one of Washington DC’s fastest-growing boutique consulting firms. The management consultancy specializes in the defense, cybersecurity, and aerospace sectors.
“Exposure to different peoples, different cultures, different value systems; it forms the way that I do business every day,” he says.
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