A trip to China inspires two decades of friendship
Rick Pollock ’03 MBA is the director of innovation at IT services firm Capgemini, and has often traveled and worked internationally. But long before that, he was a curious MBA student who thought the chance to travel around the world with a group sounded interesting. Here, he shares what it was like to participate in the popular Global Initiatives in Management course and the unexpected upsides that have endured even 20 years later.
I discovered the GIM China trip at a booth set up in the cafeteria. I was intrigued by the program, and China felt like a place I would not travel to on my own. While that year’s trip didn’t have enough students register, I led the trip the following year. We had 32 students sign up plus eight significant others including my wife. One student brought his father. Since it was 2002, we only had three cell phones for the group, which is strange to think about now.
The two-week trip was part of a twelve-week course led by Mark Finn (clinical professor of accounting) that focused on China’s culture, government, economy, and foreign investment. The learning component was student-driven with a combination of guest speakers and readings over the course of ten weeks. Every week we would tackle a different aspect of Chinese culture or business, and we had regular social outings to bond as a group.
Some of the highlights during our trip were visiting the state-owned Beijing Cigarette Factory, touring a General Motors plant, and speaking to Peter Tan ’83 MBA, who was CEO of McDonald’s Greater China at the time. We were able to really get an inside look at the country’s business culture. We also met with a panel of executives from Motorola, Oracle, Cisco, and Tsinghua Unisplendour and with media executives at MTV in China.
We also had a chance to sightsee. We climbed the Great Wall in Beijing and saw the Terracotta Warriors in Xian followed by lunch with a local family.
That initial exposure to China opened my eyes to other ways of doing business and provided valuable experience for a lot of the international work I’ve done since then. Broadly, my career has been very international and exposed me to other cultures, involving travel to Japan, Australia and Brazil.
There was also some excitement on our trip. One student misplaced her passport and had to join the rest of us a day late after our travel agent went to her house to help her find it. It was safely stashed away but she couldn’t remember where. We flew through a typhoon when landing in Hong Kong — a few of us were sick on the way down. Once we landed, the entire city was shut down, but we ventured out anyway. What an experience!
We’ve organized three reunions for all our participants and just had our 20-year trip reunion — some of us even joined by Zoom this time. Beyond the official reunions, we’ve set up dim sum brunches in Chicago and other events to stay connected.
Ultimately, the GIM China experience was a chance for me to get to know my classmates in a way that other courses in the part-time program didn’t offer. We were all professionals who worked during the day. Those two weeks of traveling together and that shared experience meant that these were the people many of us spent the most amount of time with during our part-time program. We even had one couple come out of this — two of the students on the trip ended up getting married. —Alina Dizik
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