On a beautiful, blue-skied day in 2017, Jay Nester, M.B.A. ’18, found himself perched at a winery just outside of Cape Town, South Africa, where the massive Table Mountain range majestically served as the backdrop.
The scene may as well have been the back cover of a travel magazine, but he also had important work to do at the place with the postcard setting.
The winery was an industry partner of the then-Gobal M.B.A. student at the George Washington University’s School of Business, who was in South Africa as part of the Consulting Abroad Program (CAP) required for graduation. Nester was helping to write a strategic business plan to help grow the winery that was 100% Black-owned—a big deal in the shadows of South Africa’s apartheid history.
“I was really drawn to that project,” said Nester, who is now a strategy and market leader at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in D.C. “The intersection of strategy, consulting and social impact was huge for me.”
This type of work, especially providing social impact, was exactly what he envisioned when he enrolled in GW’s Global M.B.A. program following a career switch from being a financial advisor in Texas.
CAP is celebrating 15 years of providing Global M.B.A. students such as Nester a client-focused international consulting experience that is both hands-on and immersive. Global M.B.A. candidates work in teams of four-to-five peers to find workable solutions to problems faced by industry partners around the world. Supported by faculty mentors who are veterans of consulting, international management and business development, the teams build their understanding of international business as they work to develop sustainable solutions for their host organizations.
Since 2009, more than 1,200 GW Business Global M.B.A. students have worked with over 160 partners in 19 countries. CAP participants have worked on a diversity of projects for multinational companies, national, regional, and municipal governments, nonprofit organizations, SMEs and family companies, including agribusiness in Serbia, securities markets in Turkey, supply chain management in India, SME finance in Rwanda, clean-tech energy solutions in Sweden and non-market strategy in Peru.
“[CAP] is a really clear example of how we are at the cutting edge of global education,” said Bryan Andriano, program founder and assistant dean of operations and global and experiential education at GW Business. “There’s such a tremendous capacity to provide the global learning environments that our students seek and that the world really needs.”
That learning approach was a big appeal to Claire Avett, M.B.A. ’10, who was a part of the inaugural CAP class of 2009. After spending the early part of her career as a senior consultant of foreign affairs business at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she was a logistical coordinator for project initiatives in more than 10 countries, Avett was interested in the impact and importance the private sector had on emerging and frontier markets that brought economic development at a quicker pace than traditional foreign assistance measures.
She wanted to stay internationally focused, and the revamped Global M.B.A. program curriculum that included CAP seemed like a great fit.
It fit the bill and lived up to expectations, as she worked with Adjunct Professor Nam Pham in Vietnam consulting with the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange. What she valued the most from the CAP experience is that it was far from a glorified field trip, and the things she learned during her two weeks in Vietnam still carry weight to this day, where she is the senior advisor for Co-Financing Partnerships and the Office of Structured Finance and Insurance at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.
“The people that we were able to interact with within the [Ho Chi Minh] Stock Exchange were at such a high level that that was just so informative,” Avett said. “You're on the ground and you're learning how to react and pivot and iterate all the professionalism that has to come along with that. Getting real-life experience of what it's like to consult with an actual client is real differentiator between GW and other programs.”
Drew Otto, M.B.A. ’20, felt that when he worked with a commercial real estate organization in Berlin for his CAP experience in 2019.
Another career changer who taught high school history in California before enrolling in the GW Global M.B.A. program to fulfill his love of travel and international development, Otto found the program satisfied that itch as it allowed him to network with like-minded people who helped launch his career in consultancy.
“I'm a firm believer in you get out what you put in, and I would say I was on a very productive team that worked really well together,” said Otto, who is a senior consultant of talent transformation at IBM. “Just having that experience in an international setting was part of exactly what I hoped to get out of the program.”
Going to Germany was especially sweet for Otto since he studied abroad in Berlin during his undergraduate years.
Being a program graduate holds plenty of professional merit. At Nester’s current role with TCS, he helps build consulting practices all over the world and travels frequently to Europe and Australia defining a go-to market strategy. Before that, he was a manager at Deloitte, where he focused primarily on international development organization. The hands-on experience he gained through CAP has served as a pillar for the entirety of his second career.
“The international thread has been very strong in my life, which is a huge part thanks to GW because it gave me such an incredible international focus,” Nester said. “For my career, CAP was huge in terms of giving me some credibility to get into consulting.”
Whether they are consulting with a winery at the foothills of Table Mountain, working with a real estate company navigating the housing market in one of Europe’s most historic cities or looking at the financial industry in Vietnam, the CAP experience sticks with GW Global M.B.A. students.
In fact, many of them have come back after graduation to give panel presentations on the program, guest speak in classes and meet with current teams to review their work and answer questions. The program will officially celebrate 15 years with a reception on April 17, and its proud alumni contingent illustrates the impact it has had since its inception.
“I tell people CAP was the highlight of my time at GW,” Nester said. “And I loved my time GW. I look back, and it was the best time of my life.”
This year's cohort will soon be traveling to Germany, UAE and Vietnam to meet with the project hosts and deliver their final recommendations. The student teams began work in January on a variety of complex business challenges for a range of companies including the Berlin-based startup Dogo App, Visa's Dubai-based Inclusive Impact and Sustainability team as well as the tech giant Grab in Ho Chi Minh City.
