Leaders
Every Study Tour team includes student leaders, a faculty representative, and the assistant director for MBA Global Programs in the Global Business Center (GBC).
Student Leaders: As the tour’s “resident experts”, student leaders manage all group tour logistics, organize the company visits, set up cultural activities, and contribute some content for the pre-departure sessions (IBUS 570).
Emily Rowland
Emily is a second-year MBA/MPH candidate at the University of Washington. Her experience living and working Latin America started at the age of 15, when she volunteered in Ecuador for a summer. Hooked, she returned to Latin America the following summer, this time to Mexico. After completing her undergraduate degree, she started a local chapter of a Latin American service-focused non-profit organization. While she served as president of the organization, she also spent two summers managing youth service projects in Honduras and Panama for the same organization, coordinating development projects in small communities. Emily then went on to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru from 2004 until 2006 where she developed and implemented health education programs. Emily absolutely loves Latin America and excited to be going back.
Brian Blasquez
Brian is a second-year MBA candidate at the University of Washington with aspirations of entrepreneurship in Spain or Latin America. Brian’s interest in Latin American language and culture began in his high school and undergraduate years, where he studied Spanish throughout and earned a minor in Spanish from San Diego State University.
In 2005, Brian parted ways with Four Seasons Hotels for Granada, Spain, where he studied Spanish and Andalucian culture at a private language institute. From Granada, Brian headed southwest to South America. He backpacked his way through Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, but ultimately ended up in the heart of Argentine wine country, Mendoza. He spent the next two years living and working in Mendoza with his wife, Belén.
Brian knows Mendoza and Argentine culture inside and out, and is looking forward to the possibility of sharing that with a group of Foster business students.
Study Tour Faculty Rep
We’re happy to have Michael Johnson, Professor of Management, as our study tour faculty rep!
Study tour faculty have several roles:
- Create educational content for IBUS 570 and award academic credit for the course.
- Serve as official UW representative on the tour. Having a faculty member lends credibility to the tour to overseas companies, especially in countries where a social hierarchy is an important cultural value.
- Work with student tour leaders to coordinate and implement an emergency response plan should an emergency of any kind occur. This includes alerting GBC staff.
- Learn alongside graduate students. Faculty are often selected for tours because they have no previous experience with the destination. What they learn on a tour provides invaluable educational insight that they pass along to their future students.
- Provide program continuity through long-term institutional knowledge. The Study Tours have been around for over a decade, during which time hundreds of students and a handful of staff have left UW while faculty turnover is much lower.
Jenn Adrien in the Global Business Center is the manager for the Study Tour program. Her responsibilties cover all administrative and managerial roles for all the tours as a whole, from selecting and training the Study Tour leadership teams to evaluating the program’s impact on cross-cultural learning, from running the lottery to helping teams establish in-country contacts and manage their budgets. Jenn has a B.A. in French and a M.Ed in Counseling. She joined the GBC in January 2006, since which time she has overseen 15 Study Tours and even participated in one. Jenn’s favorite thing about Study Tours is the knowledge that participants will carry meaningful memories from their tours for the rest of their lives.
