A team of
Moore School students recently held a dry run of the Global Business Immersion Camp, held for
Romanian high school students each of the past four years, by practicing their lessons in American
business practices and culture with local high school students.
Five years ago, Dr. Carolyn Jones, assistant dean of the Moore School’s Undergraduate Division, first fully developed her longtime dream of creating a service-oriented international experience for undergraduate students. Working with the World Affairs Council, Dr. Jones began a Global Business Immersion Camp for high school students in Romania. Her work with the Sister Cities Program led Dr. Jones to set up the camp in Cluj-Napoca, one of Columbia’s three sister cities in the world. The program has brought a vast array of benefits to both cities, and it is hoped that this final installment of the five-year commitment will be the best yet.
This July, the Moore School will send ten of its finest scholars to Romania for the camp’s last year under the guidance of Americans. The team, led by Dr. Laura Lambdin of the Management Department and facilitated by Leigh Stevenson, former Moore School Romanian Outreach Coordinator, and her husband Joel Stevenson, Director of USC’s Technology Incubator, will have a second mission of training Romanian university students to continue the camp in future summers.
The ten Moore School student ambassadors forming the American delegation are Kelcey Allen, Rae Fuller, Lydia Green, Simone Harvin, Daniel Kim, Dustin Morrow, Brady Riedel, Marino Sanchez, Jordan Terefencko, and Michelle Woodbury. Working together to develop a diverse array of business topics to teach Romanian high school students has been fun but challenging for the team.
The delegation developed lesson plans for academic topics including Entrepreneurship, Corporate Social Responsibility, Business Presentations, Global Supply Chain Management, and Advertising. Sharing cultural topics as well as the more difficult intellectual material with the Romanian high school students has also been a goal of the camps, so this year’s team developed a few fun classes such as American Pop Culture, Basket Ball, Tae Kwon Do, Shag Dancing, and Theater.
On Wednesday, May 7, the Moore School team tested their lesson plans by offering Columbia area students, many who are the offspring of Moore School faculty, the opportunity to participate in a dry run of this year’s Global Business Immersion Camp. The day-long event was a rousing success. The Moore School team made final revisions to lesson plans, and the student participants reported learning a month’s worth of material in a single day! The team is confident that all will go smoothly when they travel to Romania and launch the 2008 Camp.
Laura Lambdin
May 2008