Santa Clara University

For the 15 participants on the Leavey School of Business immersion trip to El Salvador, this year’s spring break may be a break from classes, but it won’t be a break from learning. Participants of SCU’s first trip designed specifically for business students will get a first-hand look at global economic issues that will likely resonate in their future endeavors as compassionate business leaders who strive to create a just and humane society.

On the weeklong trip March 22–29, the students will meet with the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, representatives of El Salvador’s two major political parties, different labor organizations, and the local entrepreneurs whose work they helped finance through microloans prior to the trip. They will also live with families for two days.

Kyle Ozawa, a senior marketing major and one of the founders of the trip, took the initiative to organize the business-focused trip after noticing that he and his friend—senior finance major and immersion trip co-founder Sam Baker—were frequently the only business majors on the seven immersion trips he attended. Ozawa felt that his classmates were missing out on a wonderful opportunity.

“I got a whole different perspective on a lot of international business and economic issues that I had learned about in class,” he explains. Instead of merely associating impersonal statistics with issues of poverty, free trade, and globalization, he could connect them with the people he had met on his journeys.

“You actually associate human faces with these numbers. At least for me personally, that really changed the way that I view the world,” he says.

The religious studies minor hopes that his fellow travelers will also come back from El Salvador equipped with personal knowledge and experiences to help inform their future economic decisions so that they create purpose as well as capital.