Before she came to Vanderbilt, Mai Pham had never been to the United States, nor had she studied outside her native Vietnam. “Everything was new for me,” she says. “I knew that the MBA time would be the most valuable and memorable in my life.”

After working as an auditor and consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Vietnam for four years, Mai wanted to leverage her strengths in finance to pursue a career in corporate finance and reach a leadership position.

But because she would be acclimating to a new country and culture—not just a new program—Mai believed that her choice of school should involve a variety of factors beyond the strength of the program itself. “I understood that the community would play an important role in determining what I can get out of my MBA,” she says, “so I decided to choose a community where I could thrive the most.”

Location mattered to her, too. “I wanted a city where I can experience a true America,” Mai says, one that was “not too cosmopolitan compared to other big cities.”

She found what she was looking for at Vanderbilt: “professors who know you by name and even your stories; opportunities to solve real problems; and interactions with classmates with diverse backgrounds and experiences.”

She also found new insights in the second country where she studied. During spring break of her first year, Mai traveled to Ecuador with a group of graduate students involved in Project Pyramid, a student-led initiative at Vanderbilt aimed at applying market-based approaches to alleviate global poverty. Mai’s team worked on a project consulting with a social enterprise tea company, which had created hundreds of jobs for indigenous woman in the Amazon basin. They advised the company on how to scale up its operations to sell its products in the U.S. market. Because of the trip, she says, “Now I am aware of countless opportunities to develop both the economy and the society in developing countries like my home country.”

I understood that the community would play an important role in determining what I can get out of my MBA, so I decided to choose a community where I could thrive the most.