Expand your horizons: Experience global business practices at first hand with an international elective

Last year, in a market in Pretoria, Samantha Chadwick bought a cheap bracelet, a hand-made, black-and-red bangle, made of beads. It has become one of the most important items she owns.

"The bangle is a physical manifestation, a permanent reminder that what you feel deeply within is what's important," she says. "I used to have to touch it every morning. Now just visualising it is enough."

Chadwick was on an international elective to South Africa, part of the Executive MBA with Lancaster University Management School. She says the trip changed her life.

"At the time of the visit, I was thinking about moving jobs, and life seemed very stressful," says Chadwick. "But I realised that my dilemma was nothing compared with what South Africans had faced for generations. I got a deep spiritual appreciation of how to understand what matters to you, and what doesn't."

This is music to the ears of Oliver Westall, the school's MBA director. "The South African economy has both high- and low-income groups, so it reflects many issues elsewhere in the world," he says. "These visits allow students to reflect on what they see and how they feel in a new and challenging environment."

Most good full-time MBA programmes now offer the chance of a foreign trip, and some make them obligatory. In America, Stanford and Yale insist on a foreign experience, and even the ultra-traditional Harvard has incorporated a trip to China.

The purpose, nature and content of such trips vary widely. A few seem to offer little more than tourist pleasures – but most demand all-out commitment.

The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, recently ran three different "learning expeditions" for students: to China, Kenya and Japan. "We try to take them to places that are likely to be relevant to their business lives," says Lisa Miller, of the school's Center for International Business.

"In the next academic year, we are looking at Brazil, India and South Africa. We have people in the school who know these locations well, so we can run cost-effective trips."

Some visits allow students to log credits towards their degrees. These involve classroom time abroad, and students are expected to deliver a project. In a non-credit trip, the emphasis is on company visits.

"Our China trip was for 10 days," says Miller. "We visited four cities and seven companies, including China's biggest dairy company, in Inner Mongolia. It gave students the opportunity to see a relatively more agricultural region and a minority ethnic group.

"There's no substitute for seeing a place first-hand. Students meet business people who talk candidly and willingly about their experiences."

Some trips have a charitable purpose, in line with current thinking about corporate social responsibility. The European leader in this was IMD, the Swiss business school, with its "discovery" programme, in which MBA students, for example, went to help rebuild Bosnia.

Durham Business School has offered trips to many countries in the past. "This year, we felt it would be attractive to some students to make a contribution to the community they visit," says Anne Woodhead, director of Durham's Executive MBA programme.

The university already has a link with the areas of Sri Lanka devastated by the 2004 tsunami. Now five EMBA students are going on a pilot project to help the cinnamon growers of southern Sri Lanka.

A number of business schools can take advantage of their own overseas campuses. Insead, based near Paris, has one in Singapore, plus two Middle Eastern centres, in Abu Dhabi and Israel. Most others form alliances with foreign schools. In March, students of Audencia Nantes' Executive MBA spent a week in China, the fifth year of the school's academic partnership with Tongji University, Shanghai.

China remains the most popular destination. Steve Seymour, Executive MBA director at Ashridge Business School, regularly takes students there. What do they learn?

"There are cultural differences," he says. "For example, there's a successful American enterprise which involves building your own teddy bear, heart and all, in a shop. It didn't work in China – and it wasn't the marketing, as they'd thought. The idea of putting the heart in, which was seen as a big selling point elsewhere, just didn't appeal to Chinese parents."

Ashridge's international study week is held just before students take their exams and their final project. EMBA students go in June, full-time ones in August. "It's a chance to apply what they've learnt to a totally different organisation in a part of the world they haven't worked in," says Seymour.

The key part of the week is called "life changes", where students work on real problems with real organisations. They get part of the brief before they go, and are able to visit the organisations two or three times – it's up to the students to arrange these visits – and then they have to make their final presentation before they return to the UK.

The presentation is assessed both by Ashridge and the clients who set the problem. A host business school arranges it.

Language is a difficulty: "After all, they're presenting Mandarin PowerPoints, not English ones," Seymour says. But last year, one student learnt enough Cantonese in a week to introduce his group to everybody in the room.

'It gave us inside knowledge'

Ashish Mathur, 26, from Delhi, is doing an MBA at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. In April, he joined an international study mission to Prague and Frankfurt.

"Twenty one of us went on an eight-day trip. The management from the international companies we met took a lot of time out and gave us inside knowledge of the organisations – it was a privilege.

The Czech Republic systems reminded me of India, which after all is also a developing country. There were a lot of people in one section. But in Frankfurt the people management skills were much more integrated in the system.

Ferrero, the chocolate manufacturer, was particularly interesting – it's a family organisation, so the standards all come from the company itself. But they are managing it nicely. It was a really interesting trip."