The Kelley Connect Week Experience
Before I go into the details of this Connect Week, I want to describe what this experience is like for the uninitiated. During these Connect weeks, we attend classes with some of the same professors who teach our MBA classes and get to spend a lot of time with other students. As online MBA students, this is something we cherish and really take advantage of. Part of the reason you get your 
MBA is to meet and build relationships with other motivated people. Kelley Connect Week not only gives us the chance to do this, but really encourages it. Something new that KD tried this year was giving us open meal vouchers to spend at any Bloomington restaurant. That was a great way for us to go explore Kirkland Ave on our own – although I should note our team just decided to go back to Nick’s (IU’s most popular campus bar) because we were craving good pizza.
At my first Connect Week, I was fortunate to be on the winning team of the Oliver Winery Case Competition. Working on this case taught me a lot about alcohol and the business side of a winery – as a non-drinker I found it very interesting and useful because I wouldn’t have learned about it otherwise. We visited the winery’s main tasting room and toured the plant and those who wanted to sample the wine did that too. At the end of the week we presented our 15 minute presentations on how the #1 winery in Indiana should grow their business to the Oliver Winery owner and executives. Not only did I learn a lot from the experience, but I also made real connections with my teammates. This is incredibly valuable because when we have to pick groups for our classes, I already know a few people in the class really well and can continue to build on what we started at Connect Week. Two of my Connect Week teammates have been in my groups for other classes since then.
Learning about the African Emerging Market
Now back to Africa – more specifically Kenya. Kelley Direct’s leadership team traveled to Kenya and South Africa to make connections with some of the brilliant minds who are putting Africa on the business map. We had the honor of meeting and presenting to Isaac Magina, the person who came up with UAP’s award-winning Kilimo Salama farming insurance project and Michael Oduor, a UAP executive. You could sense the pride they had in their country and Kilimo Salama, and it was easy to see why. Kilimo Salama is a drought protection and excessive rain insurance product designed to help small farmers in Kenya who are at risk of losing everything they have from just one bad harvest season. UAP found a way to make crop insurance affordable and technologically feasible in rural Kenya, which in turn will help thousands and eventually millions of Kenyans improve their quality of life.
It’s very unlikely I would have ever come across the Kenyan insurance industry if it wasn’t for the broad thinking leadership team of Kelley Direct. I would not have made a connection with two Kenyan innovators and a South African business professor who spent a week in Bloomington, IN for the benefit of Kelley students. And I doubt I would have ever spent time trying to understand what the people of Kenya are like, what their values are and learn how to communicate with them. Here are some of the Swahili words I picked up this week:
- Jambo – hello
- Asante – thank you
- Kilimo Salama – safe farming
- Bima – insurance
- Bei – price
- Mifugo – livestock
Sure that’s not much, but you should have seen the Kenyan’s faces light up when we used these words in our presentation to them.
Bloomington, IN Has the Warmth of the American Midwest
Our Kenyan and South African guests appreciated the Kelley students’ effort in getting to know them and told us they felt our “warmth.” They went on to say that America doesn’t always have a good reputation in their country, but their experience here was totally different from what they expected. I always tell people about how nice the people are in Bloomington – even before I started going to school here. Just go to any restaurant or hotel in the Bloomington area, the niceness is remarkable enough to be memorable. That culture carries through to the Kelley professors and staff. They are extremely helpful, down to earth and modest. I’m not sure if that’s the case in other MBA programs, but it’s definitely one thing that attracted me to Kelley Direct.
That’s not to say everyone is soft. After all, part of why we were there at our second Kelley Connect Week was to compete for a grade. After a full day of classes, we spent our afternoons and evenings preparing our case presentations for 5 days until we finally presented to professors first – then the Kenyan company executives if we were good enough to advance. I am grateful to say that for the 2nd year in a row my team (pictured above with the Kenyans) not only advanced, but won the case competition! It’s a great feeling coming out a week full of hard work, late nights and several cans of Monster with the victory!
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Comments
2 responses to “The 2013 Kelley Connect Week Takes MBA Students into the Emerging African Market”
Now you should plan to visit Kenya either with your colleagues or with us whenever we go home. Id love to talk to you about your experiences in a MBA program. Good read!!
Thanks Darshak! I was actually going to ask you and Samir about that.