Yale Curriculum: International Experience

In January 2008, groups of Yale MBA students will travel to one of eleven destinations on four continents, where they will engage in intensive study, meet with business, government, and nonprofit organization leaders, complete a trip project, and take part in cultural activities as part of the school’s distinctive International Experience.

(View the 2008 destinations.)

The International Experience trips are a mandatory component of the Yale Management Integrated Curriculum. Each of the trips, which will be led by SOM faculty members, is fully integrated with the school’s curriculum. Students prepared for the trips throughout the fall semester by researching industries in their destination countries, giving presentations to classmates, and hearing from experts on the region.

During the final week of classes, two speakers came to the school to prime students for the trips. Chan Heng Chee, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States, focused on the issues facing her small island nation, which with no natural resources has been forced to be especially creative in order to thrive in the global market. Thomas C. Barry, the founder of Zephyr Management, took a wider view, emphasizing lessons learned from his long career investing in emerging markets.

Tom Barry: “The year 1810 was the last time the developing world had a majority of the world’s economic activity – until now.”

Barry, a 1966 Yale College graduate who spoke to students on December 14, has been working in overseas finance practically since he left college. He went to work in Brazil at a time when few classmates were interested in South America and over nearly forty years in business never lost track of developing countries around the world. He founded Zephyr in 1994 to focus investment abroad. Zephyr now manages more than $2 billion.

As an international investor, Barry has watched money pour into China and India in recent years, but has focused much of his attention on Africa. The reason comes down to his equation that value is equal to opportunity divided by price, a calculus he stressed several times during his hour-long talk to the entire first-year class. “Africa is viewed as a laggard in many ways, but it’s where many of the best investments in the world are today,” he said. “China is the worst value in the world today. Investments are twice the price that they are in the U.S. today. Remember, it’s finding relative value, which is the product of opportunity and price - not the best opportunity and not the lowest price - which should be your goal.”

Barry stressed that students need to leave behind preconceived notions as they fan out across the globe. A big one is the belief that market capitalism is the only path to prosperity. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall people have said socialism doesn’t work,” he said. “They insist that all must have a market-driven economy and everyone nods their heads. Is this true when halfway through your career, China will be the largest economy in the world? China has no interest in being anything but a one-party, state-controlled society. And Russia is re-nationalizing industries, while several major oil countries are taking back their oil. Who bailed out the banks during the subprime crisis? State investment funds.”

Barry’s larger point was that students need to be aware of the flow of history and adjust their careers accordingly. Someone who had put all their resources in foreign currency and stock markets five years ago would have earned much more than if they kept it in the U.S. Ten years ago, China, India and Russia were countries in desperate need of infrastructure. Their quest for iron ore poured money into resource-rich countries such as Brazil. And with energy consumption skyrocketing, Barry sees a bright future in alternative energy. “It’s always easy to discover a rising tide after the fact,” he said. “When you’re on your trip in January, look out for where the tides of history are. Your goal is to surf the biggest wave.”


Chan Heng Chee: “For Singapore to survive it needs to be extraordinary. If it’s ordinary, it’ll be snuffed out.”

Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States Chan Heng Chee is matter-of-fact in describing her home country. Singapore, she told a group of SOM students on Dec. 12, is a tiny country, with little more than 4 million people, little space and fewer natural resources. It needs to pipe in its water from Malaysia. But since its independence from England in 1965, Singapore has become an economic player in Southeast Asia. “Singapore is well placed,” she said. “As China and India grow, we’re the middleman.”

Chan spoke to the group at the invitation of Jeffrey E. Garten, the Juan Trippe Professor in the Practice of International Trade, Finance, and Business, and former SOM dean. Garten, who built Lehman Brothers’ Asian investment banking arm, is leading the Singapore International Experience trip. Chan and Garten discussed how a country such as Singapore can remain competitive in a neighborhood where some of the highest economic growth in the world is occurring. “In Singapore you’re always worried with the question how the country survives,” she said. “We have to remain one-step ahead.”

Singapore, Chan said, is always looking for the next winning economic bet. When the British abandoned the old naval port, the country turned it into one the biggest commercial ports in the world. It built an airport that is now the world’s largest, as well as the third-largest oil refinery, Chan told the students. It has moved into the financial arena. And a country known for being puritanical has gotten into the casino business. “If you look at Singapore today compared to 10 or 15 years ago, it has really changed,” she said. “The younger ministers in the government said we need to bring in casinos or we’d become a backwater.”

One key to the nation’s prosperity, Chan said, is its political system, which centralizes power in a single party, with only minor opposition permitted. She insisted that the government is responsive to the people and is open about the challenges that face the country. The system, she said, allows Singapore to leverage its size in a region dominated by the world’s two most populous countries. “Two-thirds of the countries in the United Nations have less than 10 million people,” said Chan, who held the post of ambassador to the UN before moving to Washington in 1996. “They come to see me to find out how we became the way we are…When you go to Singapore, you must remember that we’re a city state/nation state. We’ve had to turn everything on its head. Singapore is radical in the true sense of the word. You’re a continental power; we’re just an island.”