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Internship Plus Leadership Program Add up to Tremendous Summer Experience

Each year, 20 students from top MBA programs from across the United States are selected to participate in this week-long experience. The program involves high level briefings by Canadian political and business leaders and company visits in both Ottawa and Montreal. Coslow was nominated by the MBA program at the North Carolina State University Jenkins Graduate School of Management to attend in the summer of 2008.

“This was an incredible experience,” Coslow said. “We were in lectures for 12 hours a day, starting at 8 a.m. and going on through working lunches and working dinners, ending at about 8 p.m. The program included visits with key government and corporate officials. There was a reception at the residence of the American ambassador to Canada, meetings with CEOs, including the CEO of Bombardier Aerospace – and tours of the company’s manufacturing plant – and lunch with two members of the Board of Governors – Canada’s Central Bank. It went on like that for six days, but the speakers were top notch and I learned a lot.”

“What I learned falls into several themes,” Coslow said.

“First, I learned that Canada and the United States are very interrelated, with economic and commercial ties. A tremendous amount of trade is going across the border, both ways, especially with the auto parts industry. It’s not uncommon for a major assembly to cross the border eight times,” he said. Related to this is the issue of border security: it takes too much time for the Canadian perspective, but is necessary from the American perspective.

“I also learned a lot about Canadian culture, including a level of comfort with the role of government in their lives,” he said. “It’s a different mindset. They didn’t go through a revolution, separating themselves from England. This has really affected their outlook; their social policies are much more European. ‘Communitarian culture” is how they describe themselves, with government policies focusing on the community as a whole, whereas U.S. policies focus on the individual.”

In summary, he said, “My key takeaway is that while Canadians look like us, talk like us, they are not Americans. I think Americans think of Canadians as Americans that live further north. But their political philosophies, government view of society permeate their lives. Americans are anti-tax, but there, earnings over $60,000 are taxed at 50 percent. They say this is fine because for this, you get socialized medicine, state-run pension plans and to them, it’s an equitable tradeoff.”

He also was struck by the country’s multi-lingual culture. “You see a lot of people who speak two to three languages. You can be listening to a conversation in English and then, just like that, it flips to French. It makes me wish that I had that ability.”

Following his immersion into Canadian culture, Coslow headed to America’s southwest for an internship with Halliburton. That experience grew out of his supply chain relationships class in the NC State Jenkins MBA program. The coursework gave him the tools he needed to tackle the internship project. The college’s Supply Chain Resource Cooperative arranges class projects with its members companies for MBA and undergraduate students in supply chain, and many of these lead to summer internships.
Coslow’s interest in energy was a common thread through his academic concentration, practicum class, the Canadian experience and his internship.
“The Canadian experience was a tremendous opportunity to see another country, to interact with its business leaders and government officials and get an indepth overview of Canadian society, its cultures and government,” Coslow said.

The Canadian Leadership Program was launched in 2005 by the Association of Canadian Studies in the U.S. (ACSUS) and the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, in cooperation with Foreign Affairs Canada, HEC Montreal, and the Canadian Embassy in Washington.

“I am interested in the energy industry, and Canada is America’s largest importer of oil. Canada has a lot of oil but doesn’t have the production capacity; they can’t pump it out fast enough,” he said.

While on his Canadian experience, Coslow had lunch with one of the Canadian Embassy officials based in Washington, D.C. “I got to learn a bit more about this piece of the economy that I enjoy.”

He learned more about it through his internship projects at Halliburton’s operations in Houston, Texas, particularly, ‘What is the right quantity of materials that you need to order to meet anticipated demand for the next quarter?” he said.

“I was in the strategic sourcing department. The greatest thing about the internship is that I got to see how it all fits together – the theoretical and the practical. My MBA coursework gave me the tools, but through the internship, I got to see how the tools are used. I gained a large appreciation for just how enormous the supply chain field is,” he said.

“I think there’s a tendency for the uninitiated to think this is just about manufacturing, but it’s far beyond that. It’s about how you find the supplier, manage the relationships and materials, and get the product out the door. And then there’s the forecasting: how much spend do I need to the supplier for the next time? Supply chain is a function that touches every part of an operation. And now, having worked there, I can see how true this is.“