As many undergraduate students in the US are making plans to go abroad for sun and fun during their Spring break, an increasing number of their counterparts in MBA programs are planning to use that time to travel abroad for a different purpose. Many MBA students will leave their comfort zones this spring and venture abroad to experience the global economy hands-on.

Last March, a group of 22 MBA students from the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics embarked upon a weeklong trip to Shanghai to convene with the leaders of multinational firms such as Shanghai Volkswagen and O’Melveny & Myers. Students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management organized networking excursions to various continents as part of Sloan’s International Spring Trips Program.

Some students go even further and travel to impoverished Third World countries in the hopes of bringing business development and basic health facilities to them, thus helping the poor to develop a means to make their own living. Not your typical humanitarian volunteers, these MBA students strongly believe that in the long run helping to provide business development rather than traditional aid is the best way to fight poverty.

In today’s business environment where “going global” is the defining trend, American companies are working increasingly collaboratively with their foreign counterparts to expand their overseas markets. These firms value employees who have international experience, a good knowledge of global business affairs and the capacity to work in different cultures.

In response to the realization that international experience is a marketable commodity, a growing number of American MBA students go abroad to study at prestigious European management schools, such as the London Business School and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Some of these students want the international MBA to help them obtain jobs abroad, others believe that the foreign cachet will give them a competitive edge in getting jobs in multinational companies and in applying their global business knowledge in the US.