Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics recently shared a graduate profile that highlights a unique scholarship opportunity that positions students for business careers on a global scale. The profile follows Alex Shnaydruk, who earned a full ride through Lehigh’s MBA program from the Global Village MBA scholarship.
Offered by Lehigh’s Iacocca Institute, the Global Village for Future Leaders of Research and Industry is an intensive five-week summer program that teaches entrepreneurial and leadership skills to participants while increasing their global business knowledge and cross-cultural understanding. Drawing participants from all over the world, the program creates a microcosm of the global community, combining panel discussions with executives and business consulting projects with culture nights and country presentations to facilitate the goals of the program. Alumni of the Global Village are then eligible to apply for a full-tuition scholarship to Lehigh’s MBA program and build on their broad international knowledge with more focused learning in business and management.
After attending the Global Village program, through which he worked with students from the United States, Germany, Canada, Portugal and Turkmenistan on a consulting project for a chemical company, Shnaydruk traveled to the Ukraine and founded a successful startup in spite of the economic downturn. He then returned to Lehigh to pursue his MBA and participated in Lehigh’s Small Business Development Center. He now works for NovaTech as an international engineering manager, and has already traveled to Guatemala in his first month of employment.
MBA Program Associate Dean Andrew Ward commented on the benefits of having Global Village alumni in the MBA classroom, saying that it benefits traditional MBA students as much as the scholarship student. This is an example of cooperation among offerings within the same university that can yield significant benefit to prospective MBA students who do sufficient research to take advantage of them.
