I wrote the cover story for this year’s issue of Ventures, the magazine of Susquehanna University’s Sigmund Weis School of Business. The 2,000-word “Placing the Word at Students’ Fingertips” feature focused on the Weis School’s growing emphasis on nurturing a global business perspective.

While the story referenced the school’s semester-long London Program, which I have written about before, it primarily focused on the university’s Global Opportunities (GO) curriculum. Since 2010 Susquehanna has required each student, regardless of major, to engage in at least one significant cross-cultural experience. Students may choose from among more than 50 semester-long GO Long programs or any of a rotating list of 18 two- to three-week immersion experiences.

To give the business alums a rich, solid sense of the initiative’s full scope, I conducted phone interviews with a wide range of administrators, faculty and students, including Dean Alicia J. Jackson; six faculty members; and six students. The result: 38 pages of single-spaced notes that illustrate my typical thoroughness. Besides juggling a significant number of voices in the text, I also suggested a chart detailing study abroad locations for Weis students and a sidebar that listed the international backgrounds of the school’s faculty.

Located an hour’s drive north of Harrisburg in Selinsgrove, Pa., Susquehanna might seem remote.  Yet the faculty members I interviewed included natives of Sweden, Thailand and Taiwan. Several of the students with whom I spoke had studied in London. Bobby Ries built and installed clean-burning brick cooking stoves in one-room huts high in the Peruvian Andes, then spent a semester taking business courses—in Spanish—at the Universidad de Alicante on Spain’s Costa Brava. Another student, Kristen Dumbeck, spent a semester living with a mainland Chinese student while studying at the University of Macau. She spent another semester living with a French-speaking family while attending the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium.  Now, when her classmates offer U.S. business examples, she’s thinking of Macau versus Hong Kong.

“I feel like my frame of reference is totally different and really broadened,” Dumbeck, who hopes to work on Wall Street, told me. “From management styles to world affairs, I don’t just think in the context of the United States anymore.”

 Click here to see a full PDF of the summer 2012 cover story of Ventures magazine.