Students learned from the students they helped at Eden Campus
By Sara Gilbert Frederick
When he was setting up the itinerary for his spring trip to South Africa with a group of Minnesota State University, Mankato, business students, Shane Bowyer penciled in the touristy activities first.
But after two days of seeing sites and visiting markets, Bowyer loaded his 11 students on a bus for a five hour drive to Eden Campus—a new university that is sustained, in part, by student entrepreneurship. And that’s when the fun really started.
The students helped organize the food service business at Eden. They built bean-bag games for the students. They helped hang bicycles that had been piled in the campus bike shop from the ceiling.
“They had never seen bikes hanging from the ceiling before,” Bowyer says. “They just kept them all piled up in back, but hanging them made it much easier to see what they had and to get to them.”
Bowyer, an assistant professor of management at Minnesota State Mankato and the director of the Center for Global Entrepreneurship, had planned the student trip after visiting Eden with another professor in 2008. He knew that business students from Mankato could learn from the student entrepreneurs at Eden — and that they had skills and expertise to share with the South African students as well.
“Since the Eden campus is all about entrepreneurship, my idea was to look at how we could help the students with their businesses,” Bowyer says. “For the students, it tied together service learning and entrepreneurship with the opportunity to study abroad.”
Each Minnesota State Mankato student was paired with a student from Eden. Long before the trip in May, they communicated with each other via Facebook and e-mail. By the time they met, they already knew a little bit about each other.
But by the time they parted ways in early June, they knew much more, both about the students they were paired with and the culture they had grown up in. Minnesota State students witnessed the extreme poverty that many of the South African students lived in, but they also saw how that had inspired their entrepreneurial spirits.
“In our culture here in the United States, entrepreneurship is looked as an opportunity,” Bowyer says. “In South Africa, entrepreneurship is for survival. It was important for our students to see that.”
That experience was so powerful that one student actually stayed in South Africa when the rest of the group returned, and another was already planning a return trip as well.
“It was a great experience for everyone,” Bowyer says. “They had the opportunity to experience a different culture and a different way of looking at entrepreneurship. And they had the opportunity not only to help other people, but to realize that they can learn from those people as well. It was great.”
