In the spring of 2026, a McIntire graduate student stood in a fishing village outside Winneba, Ghana, helping wire a computer lab at a school that had been teaching children to use technology on chalkboards. The same weeks found her classmates in Nairobi, working on carbon management, and in Pamplona, helping a manufacturer make public transit greener. Others were working on projects that took them to more areas across the world.
Nine months earlier, most of them had never met. They had assembled in Charlottesville as the inaugural class of a program McIntire had just brought back to life. The distance they traveled, intellectual as much as geographic, is the clearest evidence of what that program can do.
“I know I’m a global citizen,” says Livi Warren (MSGC ’26), one of that first class. “That’s something you can’t get just staying in Charlottesville.”
The program is the M.S. in Global Commerce (MSGC), which McIntire rebuilt from the ground up and relaunched in fall 2025 alongside new European business school partner ESMT Berlin: nine months, two continents, and a third destination the students choose for themselves. A year later, the faculty who lead it are unambiguous about the result.
“I consider the relaunch a success,” says Jim Burroughs, MSGC Director and Commerce Professor, who adds that he and Professor Peter Maillet are “very excited about the potential of this program over the long term.”
Maillet, the School’s Executive Director for Global Strategy and Director of the Center for Global Commerce, explains that the program is part of a larger effort at McIntire. The MSGC, he stresses, is no one-off experiment but an important piece of a Schoolwide push that also spans expanded undergraduate semester-abroad options, a growing portfolio of global immersion experiences, and a deeper effort to integrate the School’s international students into life on Grounds. The thread tying it together is McIntire’s mission: “It’s about developing global citizens who shape business and society,” he says.
A Curriculum Built for Change
If the strategy has a center of gravity, it is the fall curriculum MSGC students complete in Charlottesville, and in particular Maillet’s course, Global Challenges. Students, Burroughs says, routinely told him they “didn’t realize education could be this transformative.”
The program unfolds in three predominant movements: the “2+2 of global business,” the foundational literacy in trade alliances, central banks, and the global financial system that many students arrive lacking; the global challenges that follow, from climate and energy to geopolitics; and a final project focused on “commerce for the common good.”
Those abstractions become ever more concrete in Maillet’s course through a signature weekly exercise, the Eye on Global Markets, in which student pairs brief the class on world developments the way analysts open a Wall Street morning meeting. For Jack Witmer (McIntire ’25, MSGC ’26), a McIntire finance graduate and former Cavalier football player, it served as the cornerstone of the semester. “You could see how all of the other classes would fit into the broad, overarching ideas,” he says.
Living the Lessons
The MSGC is, in Burroughs’s words, “a live-and-learn program,” and its social engine is Global House, a physical residence at UVA where much of the cohort lived and gathered after the academic day. The origins of the cohort members read like a world map, with classmates from Asia, Europe, and beyond, drawing as well on ESMT’s own global student body.
Warren, who managed the Global House and served as a program delegate, watched a houseful of near-strangers become a team over potluck dinners and Saturday football games. “I learned a lot about the value of the why behind a statement,” she says. “Everyone has a different perspective, and living together amplified it.”
MSGC students introduce themselves during orientation at the McIntire School of Commerce. Photo courtesy of Tavaris Handley
Emma DeMarco (MSGC ’26), a delegate elected by her classmates, credits the classroom culture that grew from it. “Our professors fostered such a warm, no-judgment zone,” she says. “After you see how people can have different views and still be friends, you can share your opinion wholeheartedly.”
For Jake Litzau (MSGC ’26), living together “blurred the line between academic and personal growth,” driving home a conviction that global commerce “is as much about people as it is about the technical mechanics of business.”
Three Important Days in Washington, DC
The cohort’s education was never confined to a classroom—including the fall semester rooted in Charlottesville. One fall highlight, the U.S. Trade Lab, takes the entire program to Washington, DC, in November for a multiday, intensive study trip.
MSGC students visit Washington, DC.
Classes in Charlottesville pause while students and faculty hold back-to-back meetings with major corporations, government officials, leading journalists, and the think tanks that make Washington the epicenter of American thinking on global trade. The intent, Burroughs says, is to let students, especially international ones, see firsthand how the United States approaches business and interconnectedness. The faculty pair it with an alumni event, this year featuring Marc Short, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Mike Pence.
For Litzau, watching organizations balance economic goals against regulatory and political pressures “served as a reminder that global business leaders must be able to integrate market strategy with broader contextual awareness.”
Berlin and the Outward Leap
In January, when the students trade Charlottesville for Berlin and ESMT’s campus, the rhythm changes. Class sessions stretch to three hours or more, weekends open onto the rest of Europe, and the coursework turns toward social entrepreneurship, impact consulting, operations, and negotiations.
Emma DeMarco with MSGC classmates in Berlin
Everything, by design, continues to point toward undertaking the Social Impact Project (SIP), the five-week capstone in which student teams act as management consultants for an organization in a location of their choosing. Maillet insists the SIP is no “nice-to-have add-on”: The Global Challenges course names the problems, the consulting and project-management courses build the toolkit, and the Berlin coursework amplifies it, until the SIP becomes “the culminating integrative experience of the curriculum.”
Students source their own projects, which is why the inaugural location selections ranged so widely without anyone planning it.
Witmer and Warren joined a team in Pamplona, Spain, helping a sustainable-lighting manufacturer build an incentive structure for greener public transit. Litzau headed to Nairobi, Kenya, for carbon management. DeMarco’s group spent five weeks in Winneba, Ghana, building the aforementioned computer lab. Other teams fanned out to Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Mongolia, Malaysia, and China.
MSGC student team Wahoos for Winneba partnered with the Charlottesville-Winneba Foundation for a five-week field placement. Photo courtesy of JM Simms
Burroughs notes that while not every project was flawless, and many students began unsure even how to define their problem, that confusion, he argues, was the point. “In life, you’re going to have to figure it out,” he says, and over time, every team did.
Faculty kept a deliberate distance, checking in over mid-project Zoom calls, then watching the final presentations in Berlin. What moved Burroughs most came when students, asked whether this was a one-time exercise, said to a person that they wanted to stay connected to the NGOs and communities they had served. Giving back, he says, belongs in “a corner of their professional portfolio.”
Litzau puts the program’s value plainly, noting that the chance to return home after months of living and working across Europe and Africa gave him the ability to say, “I did that, instead of ‘I could do that.’”
For Burroughs, that distinction is the whole point, and it is bigger than a single class of 30. The SIP, he says, belongs to “the DNA of what McIntire is all about,” with the potential to extend into other corners of the School.
One year on, the reimagined MSGC has not just returned; it’s showing what it can become to the next class of global business students aiming to make an impact on the world.
The McIntire School extends its sincere gratitude to all of the organizations and partners who made this year’s SIPs possible, including two alumni, Erin Smith (M.S. in MIT ’04), CEO of Ocean Sole, and Nzioki (Zikki) Munyao (A&S ’08, M.S. in MIT ’13), CEO of Consuming Carbon, both operating in Kenya. If you are interested in learning more about supporting the SIPs through philanthropy, projects, or other engagement, please contact Darci Spuck, Director of Global Advancement, at dds6w@virginia.edu.
