Anderson School’s new Global Executive MBA for the Americas program gives students dual degree, international perspective
Business school meets travel abroad in a new program from the Anderson School of Management, where students meet every three months in four cities.
At the end of the 15-month program, the 18 traveling students will have attended five two-week sessions and will receive an executive master’s degree in business administration, said Bob Pettit, the executive director for the new Global Executive MBA for the Americas.
The program allows students who work for internationally involved companies to study different business models and trends in various cities in South America and the United States, he said.
“The advantage to the program is that you could apply what you learn right away,” Pettit said. “You finish your studies, and then you go back to your job and apply what you learned.”
Beginning in Miami this Thursday, students will travel to Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Santiago, Chile “”mdash; all of which are important gateways to business in South America, Pettit said.
The program is a partnership between UCLA and the Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile. Upon completion, students receive a dual degree from both universities.
One advantage to the program is that students are not required to leave their jobs to participate, Pettit said.
Instead of a more traditional MBA program where students spend two years studying, the global executive program allows them to take only two weeks off every couple of months, he said.
Dominique Hanssens, faculty director for the Global Executive MBA of the Americas, said the program was intended for established executives and that the curriculum would be both challenging and engaging.
Classes range from microeconomics and management to marketing and entrepreneurship. Due to the advanced material, class size will vary between 20 and 45 students, Hanssens said.
This program is modeled in part on an existing Global Executive MBA program offered by the Anderson School in Pacific Asia, Pettit said.
Both programs have developed as a result of the increasing international focus of business schools, which strive to expose their students to different business practices throughout the world, he said.
Unlike other business school global executive programs, the Anderson School has developed a more regional model that allows students to immerse themselves in a particular continent or group of countries, Pettit said.
“Other schools work on a system of how many continents you can set foot on,” he said, “(but) we add another dimension to the global program because very few people have an entirely global job.”
Yerling Vallejos, franchise business manager for Yum! Brands International in the Carribean and Latin America, said she was attracted by the competitiveness and prestige of the Anderson School’s Global MBA program.
A current resident of Florida, Vallejos said she often travels to numerous South American cities to oversee business operations and found the program suited her busy work schedule.
Vallejos said she expects the program to provide her with valuable business knowledge about the regions she has helped develop for the past three years.
“I expect the program to be very challenging and rewarding,” she said. “I expect a 360 degree view of business from the program.”
The next step with the global executive program would be integrating the South Asian program with the South American one, Pettit said.
“We’re looking into how to synthesize the programs,” he said. “At the moment, we’re a bridge for that to happen, because students from South Asia want to come to South America, and the opposite is true too.”
