In addition to semester-length programs, Wharton and Penn offer opportunities that merge unique experiential education with short-term travel across the globe. Four students discuss their experiences traveling to Europe, Bali, and Ghana.
Walking the Red Carpet at Cannes
Every morning, Kaia Chambers, W’26, had a café latte before heading to the cinema. She had never experienced a high-heel dress code before coming to Cannes, but when walking on a red carpet next to major celebrities and producers in the film industry, it would be a necessity.
After classes ended last May, Kaia traveled with the Penn Summer Abroad Cannes program to attend the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in France. Penn Summer Abroad provides course credits for students to study internationally for a span of weeks, ranging from hiking in the Alps to learning Spanish in Madrid. In Cannes, some of the year’s most famous films premiere, and for the week, Penn students get to observe a global hub of the film production and distribution businesses.
For Kaia, who is passionate about cinema and one day hopes to have her own production company, seeing the business behind these premieres was highly informative.
“We would walk out of the theater, and people are making calls, bidding and auctioning about who’s going to distribute that film.”
The next morning, she would see which company won the bid in Deadline magazine. Owing to the high-profile nature of the festival, she wasn’t just watching small, independent films; she attended the premieres of the most acclaimed and buzzy films of the year, such as Oscar winner Anora and Megalopolis.
She also had the opportunity to connect with individuals working both behind the scenes and on stage.
“Everyone next to you at Cannes is someone,” she said. “I had no ego when it came to going up to people and asking what they do.”
The best part, she says, was being able to use the “student card,” and that producers and financiers at the top of their field were more willing than usual to chat with curious students.
On the red carpets, she saw every type of celebrity, giving her once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to engage with those celebrities.
“I talked to Bella Hadid!” she recalled laughing, as if she couldn’t believe it either. “Seriously, yes. I have a photo with Bella Hadid.”
Tourists Studying Tourism in Bali
While Kaia was on the red carpet in Cannes, Lindsay Graves, W’27, was walking the beaches of Bali. With her Critical Writing Seminar, she traveled to two towns in Bali, Ubud and Denpasar, to learn firsthand about the seminar content: Tourism, Sustainability, and Local Impact.
This course was one of 18 Penn Global Seminars offered in the 2023-2024 academic year. Each Penn Global Seminar, or PGS, focuses on a subject with international implications for a semester. During winter, spring, or summer break, the class then travels to the associated region to meet with key stakeholders in the field.
Some PGS courses, like Lindsay’s, are available to students as early as their first semester on campus. This made the oftentimes daunting task of meeting people in her first year easier.
“We all came into the class with the knowledge that we were going to spend 10 days on a trip together,” Lindsay said. “We came in very excited to form relationships with each other. We had weekly lunches after class and became almost like a little family of sorts.”
The trip itself began in the capital of Bali, Denpasar. The students heard guest lectures on sustainable tourism and the impact of tourism on the region and went behind the scenes at museums to learn further about how tourism has influenced Bali’s culture. When discussing her visit to Bali’s largest university, Udayana University, Lindsay mentioned her newfound relationships with students at Udayana as one of the highlights of her trip.
“We formed very personal connections,” she said. “We ended up hanging out with the students. We still follow each other [on Instagram].”
Even though the course was housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, she was able to relate its contents to her interests in business. For example, one of their assignments was to create a white paper, and she wrote hers on large hotel chains and sustainable tourism.
She says that when they went to a five-star Hilton Hotel, she “was able to think from that business perspective and not just a tourist perspective of how this could be changed.”
The trip was deliberate about the class experiencing different layers of Balinese tourism and culture. They stayed in both traditional village-style and corporate hotels, which allowed her to see the duality of different tourism opportunities.
Beyond the traditional souvenirs that she brought home from the trip, she tried to take home more intangible parts of the culture with her.
“I’m a big foodie, so I loved nasi goreng, which is the fried rice over there. I tried to recreate it at home. I’ll never be able to.”
Think Tanks and Takeaways in Copenhagen and Stockholm
Hannah Zhang, W’25, traveled with two instructors and 20 peers to Denmark and Sweden the summer after her first year. Under the Wharton International Program to Copenhagen and Stockholm, she was able to travel to the headquarters of companies like H&M, IKEA, LEGO, Pandora, and Klarna.
A key part of their experience was getting to meet CEOs, CMOs, and other key executives at these firms, and to learn directly from them at their “home base.” She mentioned Klarna as a particularly stimulating experience—rather than a traditional speaker event where they would ask questions and listen, the Wharton students were engaged in a “think tank” with Klarna executives.
“I was a first-year at the time, and I was shocked that they cared anything about what we had to say. It was like, ‘So what do you think? How can we improve?’” Hannah recalled. “We were basically asking questions and pointing out how they weren’t being customer centric.”
Even though they learned about the companies before going, Hannah mentioned that being able to “dig deep” when asking questions allowed her to understand the vision of the companies in a way that would be impossible without visiting them in their home countries.
“In this context, it’s like a two-way street where they’re asking for your opinion,” Hannah noted. “This is their home base, and they can show you a lot more.”
The counterpart of their company visits were cultural excursions. In Denmark, they went to Tivoli Gardens, an amusement park in the center of Copenhagen. In Sweden, they traveled between towns to see castles across the country.
Hannah said that the itinerary “was such a perfect balance of learning and exploring.”
She studied abroad in London as a result of this experience: “This was one of the reasons I wanted to go abroad… [WIP was] absolutely life changing.”
Hospitals, Factories, and the IMF in Accra, Ghana
Sophia Shi, W’25 C’25, participated in a Wharton Global Modular Course (GMC) during her spring break: HCMG/OIDD: Health Care and Business in Ghana.
GMCs provide experiential learning in “key business locations around the world.” The courses, held during breaks throughout the school year, span most continents and cover complex business topics in emerging markets and in developed economies.
In 2024-2025, courses range from “Anticipating Business in an Emerging Socialist Country” in Vietnam to “Luxury Branding and Retailing in France: Bringing it into the 21st Century.”
Unlike other global programs, GMCs are open to undergraduate and graduate students, and Sophia was one of only two undergraduates on her trip. The remainder were MBAs, who gave her some unique insights.
“It was really interesting. I got a lot of career advice from them,” she said. “A lot of them are in fields that I want to eventually get into. One of them was even a politician.”
During the trip, they visited rural and urban hospitals, steel and chocolate factories, and heard from a variety of speakers. One, for example, came from the International Monetary Fund to discuss the emergence of mobile money in the region. This linked together Sophia’s interests of healthcare equity and business, and she was able to compare them between cultures and countries.
Some of their speakers would come to their nighttime get-togethers, and she was especially impressed by one Wharton alum she spoke to.
“One of the speakers associated with Wharton is working from Philly to Ghana and is trying to start a new diagnostics testing company since a lot of clinical trials are done with only Caucasian patients,” she said. “He’s trying to spread clinical trials to test more West African patients, too.”
They also enjoyed opportunities beyond the academic and professional aspects of the trip. Like Lindsay, Sophia’s cohort went to the beach and had a large buffet-style dinner by the water.
She also highlighted how calm the culture was and how different that was from the student mindset.
“Whenever we would go and be in a rush, [the Ghanaians] would always be like: ‘Calm down. You’re exactly where you need to be in this moment.’”
Even though it lasted only a week, the GMC was key for understanding Sophia’s future beyond her career ambitions. Through unexpected networks and philosophies, it brought her out of her comfort zone and expanded her horizons.
—Alex Zhou, C’27, W’27
Posted: March 26, 2025
