Business students go worldwide

Senior Katie Fitzpatrick sat comfortably in a three-piece business suit as she waited to present a group project Monday. Fitzpatrick remained calm, despite the fact that four of her group members were across the Atlantic Ocean, six time zones away, in Brandenburg, Germany.\n"When I realized I would be working with the German students, I was pretty shocked and a little overwhelmed," Fitzpatrick said. She is one of 27 undergraduate student taking K317: Enterprise Resource Planning Tools with professor Dan Conway, who developed the course with Dr. Robert U. Franz in Germany. Students in the class are getting a taste of what the global business world is like through first-hand experience with their counterparts at Fachhochschule Brandenburg, a business school in former East Germany.\n"If we do this right, young people can be the ambassadors in the global business world," Conway said.\nAlthough Conway's syllabus accounted for a "disruption" in mid-November, few students predicted the disruption would come from thousands of miles away.\n"The most challenging part was working with the group from Germany with the language barrier and the time difference," said senior Jon Lechko. "It was hard to organize and get everyone on the same page."\nWhen they learned Nov. 15 that they would be merging their fictional automotive company with a corporation on another continent, students were thrown into a lifelike situation that those in the global business world know well.\n"From my point of view, this is the best possible way for students getting to see what this is like in the real world," said Amelia Maurizio, director of Global Education Alliances at SAP, a transnational technology company which makes software that runs 95 percent of Fortune 1000 companies. Although SAP is working with over 500 universities worldwide, this was the first teaching experience where students had to work across time zone, language and cultural barriers.\n"You may think you're a good communicator, but when someone doesn't speak the same language, it's a whole different ballgame," Fitzpatrick said. \nAlthough difficulties arose, Fitzpatrick said it was not as difficult as she thought it would be. She also found the experience to be extremely valuable.\n"SAP is a popular thing in the workforce right now," she said. "This has really been paying off in interviews because not a lot of schools offer it, so it has put me ahead."\nFive teams presented their merger proposals Monday via video conference with Brandenburg. They were evaluated by panelists representing General Mills, BP, John Deere and SAP software.\nEven with such advanced technology available to the students, including SAP, e-mail, e-Snips and video conferences, some problems were unavoidable. Although the German students' English was far better than the American students' German, language barriers proved problematic.\n"My English is not so good. Can you write me a letter?" asked one good-humored German student in response to a panelist's verbal question. Other German students said a glossary would be helpful to clarify some of the diction of American college students.\nMost of the groups also had trouble working around the Americans' Thanksgiving holiday, which fell right after the international teams joined. Students felt the Thanksgiving break intensified the shortness of the three week period they had to prepare their presentations.\n"(Dr. Robert U. Franz and I) could see when things were going badly, and other things where we would've been quite helpful, but we had to stop ourselves from doing that," Conway said, pointing out that problems can be the best learning tool for students.\nNext semester, Conway plans to converge his class with one in Asia, where the time zone barriers will be even greater. Along with SAP representatives, Conway hopes this class serves as a prototype for other universities wanting to offer a first-hand global business education. \n"We're just trying to change the world," Conway said. "That's all"