Kyle Ozawa ’08 noticed that he and his friend Sam Baker ’08 were frequently the only business students on Santa Clara’s cultural immersion trips—and he felt that his business school classmates were missing out on a wonderful opportunity.

So Kyle and Sam helped design a weeklong immersion trip to El Salvador that would give 15 other business students a close-up look at global economic issues and give them a chance to meet with local business leaders, politicians, and labor organizations. But that wasn’t all—the students had also granted a microloan to a Salvadoran cooperative that harvests organic fruits and vegetables, which will be used for the construction of a handmade irrigation system.

“I got a whole different perspective on a lot of international business and economic issues that I had learned about in class. You actually associate human faces with these numbers. At least for me personally, that really changed the way that I view the world,” Ozawa says.