The School of Business at Rutgers offers a 12-day spring break program that allows students to meet with various South African business and government representatives to study the nation’s business market. In some cases, students have developed business models, which many South African institutions have incorporated into their marketing plans.
“They’re really leaving something behind that helps,” says Cal Maradonna, Rutgers’ associate provost for student life, who organized the first study program in 1996.
With visits to Soweto, Namibia and the Cape of Good Hope, students learn the lessons of social and racial strife. Maradonna says some students are uneasy with visiting townships where citizens were once forced to live under apartheid.
“We would be doing a disservice to the students if we did not let them see this,” he says. “It is a way to learn about South Africa’s history and the poverty that many people continue to live in.”
Brett E. Tanzman, a third-year law student at the Rutgers Law School, joined a select group of business students and a small group of law students on last year’s trip to South Africa. Tanzman, who is the editor in chief of the school’s Journal of Law and Public Policy, says the experience had a profound impact on his legal studies.
“South Africa serves as sort of a model of how a country can reconcile differences and overcome challenges,” he says. “And to see where they are now post-apartheid is amazing.”
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