This year, the Colorado Mesa University (CMU) Business Program offered the opportunity to go to Costa Rica as part of an International Business class taught by Carlos Baldo. Seventeen students met for four sessions to discuss the required text before jetting off to San Jose for a week of touring businesses and learning how companies operate abroad.
It was not the most relaxing or fun filled spring break that most college students have. Although we were in a tropical country for the week, we spent our days not on the beach, but meeting with international business people and relating our experience to the text we discussed before the trip. We used the information we gathered to write Experiential Learning Journals and create presentations about what we learned throughout our time in Costa Rica.
We spent the first two days at EARTH University, which is an agriculture-based school where exchange students from tropical countries learn how to farm in an environmentally friendly way so that they can take their knowledge back to their home countries. We saw their banana farms and tasted raw cocoa beans while learning about how important sustainability is in Costa Rica.
Our next educational tour was probably my favorite. We went to the only Starbucks Research and Development farm in the world. This farm officially opened to visitors about two weeks before we were there, meaning we were one of the first American tour groups to experience it.
We walked through the entire process of growing and processing coffee beans. Costa Rica is a very unique place for coffee to grow due to the volcanic soil and the tropical climate. We were able to try different types and roasts of the coffee that they have been producing. Starbucks helps the local community by providing the space and materials for local farmers to grow, and then Starbucks buys the beans from the local farmers, helping to boost the Costa Rican economy.
Starbucks is not the only well-known company that we were able to see! We spent two days in the America Free Zone, which is a tax-exempt business park for multinational companies to run outsourced operations. Companies in the America Free Zone include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Bayer, Bosch and Amazon. We were able to tour all of these facilities and meet with employees to see how these huge companies operate in different countries.
Finally, the last truly educational tours we had were of a rice farm, a mango farm and a sugar cane refinery. We saw how rice is grown and learned about the impact that rice exportation has on the Costa Rican economy. We were able to walk through a mango processing factory were they clean and package the mangos to send to the United States and Europe. Finally, we walked through the whole process of how sugar cane goes from being a plant to how it is completely refined to the sugar we buy in a store.
That sounds like a lot of work for a week that is supposed to be for relaxing and getting caught up on school. Don’t worry! In between all of our tours, we also got to experience some of Costa Rica’s beautiful outdoors. We hiked through a rain forest, where we came face to face with the deadliest snake in Central America. Some of us zip-lined through the Cloud Forrest while others took a walk on bridges suspended high off of the forest floor. On our very last day in Costa Rica, we got a little bit of beach time! It was a nice and relaxing way to end such a busy week of amazing business experiences.
Although it was not the typical spring break that college students have, we all had a blast learning and earning three credits to go towards our various business degrees. As a class, we hope that CMU offers more hands-on opportunities like this in the future.
