Students get first-hand European lesson

While heavy snow was taking much of North America by storm, twenty Wharton students and their faculty advisor were causing a small blizzard of their own throughout Europe. The students, participants in a trip to Germany and Belgium which was sponsored Wharton's Awareness of International Markets club (AIM), spent spring break touring various German corporations and the Belgian headquarters of the European Community. "I would say that the company visits were excellent in some cases," said Greg Gorman, a College and Wharton sophomore. "Europe itself is excellent because there is so much history there." Gorman, who chaired the AIM committee that planned the trip, added that everything, except for a 30-hour airport delay in Amsterdam, went as planned. According to William Laufer, assistant professor of legal studies and the faculty advisor to AIM, the corporate visits ranged from "elaborate affairs at the Deutche Bank to tours of manufacturing facilities." And the visit to the EC, Laufer said, was quite unsettling. "I got the most out of the EC briefing in Brussels," Laufer said. "I was very disillusioned by the lack of organization there. The EC doesn't seem to be working very effectively." Both Gorman and Wharton junior Peter Ehrich, a trip participant, said that the visit to the EC alerted the group to the problems that the Europeans are having with their efforts to cooperate economically and politically. "The EC faces many, many problems," Gorman said. "They have so many different things to take into account that it is very difficult now." Ehrich said he believes that if the EC is going to work, "it's going to take a long time." Laufer cited the EC's lack of a substantial response to the situation in Yugoslavia as evidence that it is not "working very effectively." He said that when he asked an EC official about the community's actions regarding the situation there, the official responded by telling him that the EC formally backs the actions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States. "It's amazing that the most the EC has done is back two superpowers," Laufer said. Despite the tensions toward foreigners that some participants say they felt throughout their stay in Germany, participants say the trip was quite successful, both educationally and socially. "I really felt that this year the group of students that went really got along well with each other and spent time with each other," said Wharton sophomore Maribelle Bernabe. She said she felt that the cohesive nature of the group contributed to the group's overall experience.