Nine Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship concentrators traveled to India this summer to take part in the second year of an internship program that links Brown students to multinational companies based in India.
Coordinated by the COE program, Vice President for Research Clyde Briant and Brown alums and parents in India, the six to eight-week program is intended to expose COE concentrators to a foreign work experience and the corporate culture of India's rapidly growing economy.
"The way we try to approach the internship is, 'Here are these companies in a fast-growing country in Asia, and this is giving you an opportunity to see that and at the same time be exposed to all of the cultural differences and challenges of working in India,' " said Maria Carkovic, administrative director of the COE program.
After being accepted into the program by the faculty of the COE program, each intern was matched with one of three Indian conglomerates - pharmaceutical manufacturer Jubilant Organosys, real estate developer Godrej Properties or steel manufacturer Mukand.
Since each company is in a different industry and has several different business lines and products, Carkovic said each intern's experience was unique.
"For a COE major, I think what we are providing is an experience in the business world in a different country more than a particular experience doing a marketing project at company 'X,' " she said.
Though students did not receive credit for the internship, the students had no expenses for the two-month experience. The University paid the interns' travel expenses, including vaccination and visa costs, and the Indian companies provided room and board.
There are currently no plans to provide academic credits for the internships because the COE program does not have the resources to ensure that the experiences are academically rigorous enough, Carkovic said.
Though Carkovic said there currently are no plans to replicate the experience in other countries, initiatives like the India internship program are a key component of the COE concentration, which seeks to provide a growing number of preparatory experiences for concentrators interested in business careers.
Within the COE program, the internships serve to connect the academic framework for business taught in the classroom to the real-life complexities of working for a large corporation. "We see it as one more element of experiential learning," Carkovic said.
During his time in India, COE concentrator Amir Valliani '09 did market research for Jubilant Organosys's vitamin business. Valliani said the most valuable aspect of his experience was observing the differences between American and Indian corporate culture.
"In the U.S., if you look at corporate culture in general, things are structured towards satisfying shareholders, while in India things are more oriented towards building personal relationships," Valliani said.
The Indian workday begins later in the day, Valliani said, and "before you sit down at any meeting to talk business, you have a cup of chai. That bonding is where it really showed that India is a high context culture."
