"We're helping students look at broader issues in business like the work environment or management strategies instead of always focusing on the bottom line," Kinczel says.

Students that have been involved with the ISC and IMS in the past say that helping students see a different side of the business world is what the two organizations do best.

"The experience really peaked my interest in business and management, especially on an international level," says Brian T. Abrams '00, who attended last year's symposium in Switzerland. "I saw the challenges that exist with respect to differences in culture and how that affects business as well as the potential rewards."

To win an invitation to the symposium, Abrams wrote an essay on how companies could use an electronic signature on mass-produced items. He attended various lectures and workshops during his stay.

"Where a big presentation might deal with wider, broader topics, the workshops dealt with more specialized topics in business and economics," says Abrams, who went to one workshop on turning around failing companies and another on venture capital in southeast Asia. Abrams also attended speeches by the presidents of Switzerland and Germany and ate dinner with the chief executive of Proctor and Gamble, Edwin Artze.

A government concentrator who had never taken an economics course before attending the conference, Abrams says IMS changed the way he looks at business.

Kinczel says that success stories like Abrams's are the reason why the organization works to plan successful events.

"It's about having an integrated, targeted plan of building our network of contacts," Kinczel says, explaining that by attracting American executives to the IMS in Switzerland, the ISC can collect sponsors who will pay for students to attend the event.

"More importantly, though, we want to attract people to Harvard's symposium," Kinczel adds. "These are companies that are interested in our ideas, goals and values; we want them listening to us."