Thunderbird Student Voices

Cambodian-American Chan Roeun Mak ‘12 is a contract-negotiation specialist for Boeing in Seattle. She’s also a T-bird, working towards her MBA from Thunderbird’s Global MBA On Demand program. She works frequently with customers in different parts of Europe and Russia.

Earlier this year, Mak was studying with her GMBA cohort in Santiago, Chile when an 8.8 Richter-scale earthquake shook the city.

“I was able to witness how our customer airlines executed contingency plans and handled a natural disaster,” she said. “Who knew that a natural disaster could become a professional learning opportunity?”

Read more about her here.

(Photo, Chan Roeun Mak in Prague.)

Guest post by Kate Robertson, ‘10 MBA

Kate is currently in Peru working on the next collection for Mayu, her alpaca knitwear business. It is a fair trade company run from Peru, her home base in Chicago and Thunderbird.

Thunderbirds are truly global, and we can prove it! We’ve just posted some of the entries from our student photo contest on our Flickr page. Check it out for pictures from all over the world. Do you know some of these T-birds?

Click on the picture to see more!

By Kelly Fuson, MBA Global Management ‘11

A Frientor is someone who is both a friend and a mentor. It was a term that originated from a brainstorming session between myself and a couple of my coworkers during my time as an intern this summer. Obviously, since it’s not a real word we did not end up using it for one of our clients. But it continues to be an inside joke in our office as we now refer to ourselves as “team Frientor.”

But in all seriousness, frientor is the perfect word to describe the supervisor that I have for my internship. While many of us are happy to have internships for the summer, not everyone is having an equally pleasant experience. I can’t help but feel very lucky to have a mentor that I also consider a friend. He has invited me to spend time with his amazing family, who fed me an incredible dinner and put up with my rambunctious dog. He has included me in countless meetings when it wasn’t necessary. He has given me meaningful assignments that I know are having a positive impact on the organization. And he has been giving me honest and helpful feedback that has contributed to my professional growth.

In a way I feel almost spoiled, as if I should be having an experience like something out of The Devil Wears Prada. But you know what? I’m sure there will be plenty of other times in my career more like that. So for the time being, I’m going to relish in the positive environment that I have right now and remember this moment when the day comes that I need to be a frientor to someone else.

By Philip Arsenis ‘11, MA

At about 5am Thursday morning, I had a shooting pain in my lower abdomen, I thought it was food poisoning. After trying to sleep and ignore the pain, I couldn’t deny it any more and told my host mother I needed a doctor. She contacted Professor Carney, who ordered me to the hospital. So, I went. I swung by the school in a cab, picked up professor Carney and too my surprise and fortune our excellent social coordinator, Natasha jumped in the back seat and we drove a few blocks to Hospital Aliman (A private Argentinean Hospital, still subsidized by Germany).We walk in and pay $120 pesos, about $30 US dollars, not much to see a professional doctor. Talk about reasonable. After only waiting about 40 minutes, which is practically nothing, although it seemed like a lifetime to me, I meet with a doctor whom after pushing on my stomach and asking me a few questions in English sent me to get blood tests. I was told it may be my appendix, but nothing was for sure.

And so the day went, Natasha took me from one test to another, blood tests down the hall, sonogram on level 3, ect. The pain wasn’t getting any better so Natasha had to push me around in a wheelchair. Luckily, our friend Miguelito (Mike Landa) arrived around 2pm, and was able to take over the steering responsibilities as my feet are poor bumpers. By about 4pm, less than 5 hours since I had walked into the hospital, I was in the ER room meeting with the two surgeons who were scheduling me for an operation that night. I was relieved to hear that i was going to be operated on immediately because I knew I was going to get painkillers even sooner!!!

Read more »

By Philip Arsenis ‘11, MA

I am starting my second week in Argentina and have been blown away by a few surprises on this trip thus far. Firstly, this is a pilot program, something that has not been tried before, and, surprisingly has not had not serious glitches, major date changes, or conflicts. Professor Carmen Carney is to thank for the smooth running of this program. Secondly, the school we are working with here, ECELA, is a totally professional institution dedicated to the Thunderbird students education both academic, cultural and professional. ECELA has made every experience genuine, educational and organized. Natasha, our social programmer, is always on time, friendly and informed. For example, we went to the Argentinean stock exchange yesterday and were given a good hour and a half to ask a veteran of 20 years any and all questions that intriguedus. An experience I don’t want to take for granite. We have also had three professional presenters, scholars with masters, present on topics such as immigration in Argentina and the history of the Tango.

Read more »

Guest post by Thunderbird MBA student Emily Eckert, ‘11

Emily is currently working as Reporting Officer Intern for FLAG International in Afghanistan. FLAG is a consulting company that provides technical and management consulting services for companies seeking to generate an above-average return on the capital of their owners and investors.

It has certainly been an interesting week. This week was the Kabul International Conference held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over 70 country representatives gathered to discuss the future of Afghanistan. The key points made at the conference were as follows: corruption, “Afghanization”, and troop pull-out by 2014. More on the results of the conference in a moment.

During the conference, we were on “lock down,” meaning that we couldn’t leave our compound for the duration. Fortunately, the duration was only two days. We worked from our compound, but were much less productive than at the office. Mostly the lock down was because of the heightened security and presence of police checkpoints on the streets would have made it very difficult to get to our office. But there was also the threat of attacks. My housemates and I spent the two days sleeping in, working on our tans and projects at the same time, and having a barbeque each night in the garden. Very arduous and dangerous work.

Read more »

Thunderbird student ambassadors routinely ask alumni for gifts at the campus call center that reopened in fall 2009. But Tekena Koko ’10 went one step further.

Even before she graduates in August 2010, the call center worker pledged to give $50,000 over five years.

“I thought it would be great to make a difference in someone else’s life and get someone else to go through the life-changing experience I went through,” said Koko, who brought her 5-year-old daughter with her to Glendale, Arizona, and left her husband and 2-year-old twins at home in Rivers, Nigeria.

Overall, an average of 20 students from nine countries worked at the call center in fiscal 2009-10, generating alumni pledges of more than $233,700 from 2,264 alumni. Money raised supports Campaign Thunderbird, a campaign launched in 2008 to raise $65 million by the end of fiscal 2010-11.

The call center also helped Thunderbird achieve its goal of a 15 percent alumni participation rate in fiscal 2009-10.

“Originally I got involved with the call center because I had a background in sales and I believed I could contribute because of my experience, particularly in fundraising,” Koko said. “I knew I could raise funds.”

But that wasn’t enough for Koko; she wanted to give as well. So she talked to her friend, Gbemi Disu ’06, assistant director of Leadership Annual Giving at Thunderbird.

Disu arranged for Koko to give to the SHARE Scholarship, designed to help exceptional students in emerging markets attend Thunderbird. Scholarship recipients are set up with one or two donors as mentors, who maintain a relationship with the recipients throughout their Thunderbird experience and beyond.

Koko hopes others will follow her example of giving, but she mostly wants to give others from Africa the opportunity to have the Thunderbird experience.

“The friendships I have made so far are invaluable,” she said. “I never knew people would be so open despite differences in culture. And the professors are amazing.”

– Claire Ford

By Kelly Fuson, MBA in Global Management ‘11

As a woman in a new city I’ve done what I usually do to get to know my surroundings. I’ve grabbed all of the tourist brochures that I find. I’ve made my list of things I want to see and I’ve been steadily checking them off as I go along. I’ve been invited out by my coworkers and also done things by myself. But it wasn’t until tonight that I finally found my home away from home – or home away from Thunderbird that is.

Tonight was the night that I met up with my third Meet-Up group, the French Language Meet-Up. For those of you who aren’t familiar, MeetUp.com is a great website that allows you to meet other people who share your interests – and also a great way to get to know a new city. I was first introduced to MeetUp.com when I moved to Los Angeles. A friend recommended it to me and I quickly found a Chihuahua-lovers meet-up group. So when I moved to Colorado for my summer internship I thought, why not find some meet-up groups here?

I had already met up with the Daschund meet-up group and the Country Line Dance meet-up group, both of which were great. But the French Language meet-up group was where I finally felt the Thunderbird spirit again. About thirty of us met at La Creperie in downtown Colorado Springs to speak french and discuss our love of the french culture.

I sat next to some great people. First, there was Liz and Jean-Marc, both college students. Liz was majoring in French and had studied abroad in Paris. Jean-Marc was from Louisiana, and while he wasn’t as good at french (he knew Spanish), he made a good effort. Both had done extensive travel in Europe and shared some great stories that many people twice their age would be jealous of. Next, there was Lucy and Rick, an adorable couple in their sixties or so. Rick had spent several years as a teenager in Germany while his family was stationed there in the military. Lucy is from Chicago and went to college in Colorado and surprisingly had never been to France, but you wouldn’t know it based on the quality of her speaking abilities. She will get her first opportunity this December when her and Rick spend a few weeks traveling from Paris to the south of France.

I felt right at home with these people, like I was back at Thunderbird. I was able to teach them some words in Czech that I had learned while studying in Prague, and they helped me brush up on my french skills. We ended the evening with a group rendition of the Song of Marseille in honor of Bastille Day. Not many people remembered all of the lyrics, but with the help of my HTC smartphone we had them in front of us in no time.

It was a fantastic evening exchanging stories amongst strangers who felt like lifelong friends. So if you’re in a new and unfamiliar city and are looking for some familiar company, I encourage you to jump on to meetup.com and find your local language meet-up group!

Guest post by Thunderbird MBA student David Kralik ’11

In early May 2010, 28 Thunderbird students embarked on a five-country, two-week tour to better understand the high-technology business environment of Asia. This video includes interviews and images from the learning journey. In China, watch the video on Tudou.com.