BizAnalyst Network: MBA GONE WILD -- FOR TRAVEL

Thursday, March 23, 2006

MBA GONE WILD -- FOR TRAVEL

MBA GONE WILD -- FOR TRAVEL

For many B-school students, spring break is a time to journey
abroad, in order to do some good or even try out a business idea
Spring break is a time for relaxing on the beach and sipping
margaritas, right? Not for many current MBA students, who are
more mature than some of their undergraduate counterparts and are
used to squeezing all they can out of their experiences. From
thumbing it through Europe to tasting la dolce vita in Italy,
MBAs are taking spring break to a whole new level.

Traveling is a way to broaden horizons and learn about other
cultures in a way that you can't from textbooks -- and that's
never a bad thing for those looking to better understand the
burgeoning global economy. "I get a lot of value out of seeing
new places and the world from a different perspective," says
Chris Fearn, a student at the University of Oxford's Sa�d
Business School, who is hitchhiking to Morocco during spring
break. "It's a win-win-win. I think it's important to push
yourself beyond your comfort zone."

Fearn was looking to do something a little wacky during his time
off, so the 29-year-old Canadian decided to hitchhike from Oxford
to Marrakesh for a good cause. The trip is organized through Link
Community Development (LCD), a group that will use the more than
$600 in pledges that Fearn has raised to build schools in South
Africa, Uganda, Malawi, and Ghana. Thumbing it to Morocco is now
tradition. More than 2,500 hitchers have taken the same route to
support LCD projects in the past 14 years -- surprisingly, most
of them take only four or five days to cover the roughly 1,600
miles from Oxford to Marrakesh.