Study Abroad to Greece - Dr. Jim Pappas, Department Head of Management at Oklahoma State University

Hi, my name is Jim Pappas. I'm an associate professor of management in the Spears School of Business. So I graduated from a school called Tufts University in Boston, and then after I graduated I worked for a couple years in finance industry and banking, before going to get my MBA. I went out west to the University of Washington for my MBA and during that time, I had a question of like what I wanted to do with my career just like any other student might have, and at the time it was pretty invoked to go for health care. So I added another master's degree at the time in Healthcare Management, and I ended up with two graduate degrees there at University of Washington.

At that point, I went to work for the Mayo Medical Center in Minnesota, and worked there for a number of years before going into Consulting at Arthur Anderson. So I've kind of worked around in the healthcare industry for the beginning part of my career, and then moved back to Boston and worked for Mass General Hospital for a while before getting my PhD. I got my PhD at University of Massachusetts in Western Massachusetts in 2001 and started working at Oklahoma State right after that.

So I teach fundamentals of management since 2008, and then right around that time, I started working for CAGLE a little bit and doing study abroad. I did the London program and the France program with some people who are long since retired. Learned the ropes and then kind of decided to offer my own programs. Back then faculty would kind of develop their own programs and then work on those you know on their own time. I had been over in Greece for sabbatical and so I had a lot of company contacts and it was easy to do. We've been running that program probably for over 12 years so that's been a long-standing program. I've probably done 15 study abroads with CAGLE.

Well I am a Greek American, so it's fun for me to go and sort of give students some sort of perspective that they might not be able to get from maybe other people who think of Greece differently than I might. I have relatives that live over there. I've been over there numerous times in my life. I understand the culture and I understand the history really well. So all those factors, I try to give a little entree to students about why it's important to understand the history, before you go travel.

So one of the things that we always impress upon students that having an international experience in any way shape or form is really important for a business student. Business students really need to show their employers that they're open to new experiences and have maybe seen new cultures or understand how business is conducted in different countries. So doing business in London is a lot different than doing business in Greece, so our class is "Doing business in Greece." We introduce students to the financial crisis. We introduce them to the different location, the geolocation of Greece is really right between Asia, Africa and Europe, so it has a very different kind of importance to the global economy.

Also Greece has a lot of cultural elements to it, so we want students to understand how culture is combined with the business aspect of it as well. So we do a lot of cultural visits to museums or obviously the Parthenon and places like that.

So the basic structure I think of most study abroads that we do at CAGLE and certainly in Greece is a combination of fun times. We definitely want students to have their free time to do that so we try to build in a little bit of free time. We also are deathly afraid of the free time, so we build in a lot of work time. So in a program like Greece we really do fill our schedule, full up all day with either business meetings or cultural visits or guest speakers. We go to universities. We have professors that give talks about different things. We go to companies, manufacturing plants, you name it. Then we go on a lot of cultural visits. We go to the Parthenon which takes a long time, maybe you know half a day for sure to see it and we go to the museum afterwards.

We do also try to build in some free time for students so they can get out and see what the various locations are like. This year we went to an island called Naxos. In the past we've gone to Mykonos. Those places we try to give students more free time to kind of just relax and usually they're in the middle of the trip and it gives them a couple of days to kind of recharge their batteries which is great. Over that time this year, we actually met our students in Naxos and we did a writing assignment so I don't think they were very happy about that. But, for us from a faculty perspective, we like to just know where the students are, make sure everyone's safe and doing well.

I think during a normal day you know, students, they do stay up a lot you know very late at night and all that kind of stuff, so we schedule a lot of things in the morning. We're always nervous in the mornings, like if anyone's not going to show up. But they all show up. Our students really dress well for the trips. They know what to bring. They know what kind of questions to ask. We prepare them for the visits that we do. One of the visits that we do in Greece is at the bank of Greece, which is similar to the FED in the United States. It's not a commercial bank or anything, it's the Bank of Greece.

We have an economist kind of discuss a lot of the the economy in Greece and it's a lot of charts, a lot of graphs as you can imagine from an economist. So we try to prep students for that and they usually have prepared questions when they come in. This year, we had a lot of we had a few HTM students. We had many non-business students and they really ask different types of questions that we don't normally get from business students and that was kind of nice. I thought it's good that we have more students from around campus going to Greece.

So I'm speaking to all students on campus, an international experience is really valuable no matter what you do. It's going to look great on your resume and it's going to really open up your perspective to different ways of thinking. You should no matter who you are, go on a trip somewhere. Especially with CAGLE.