The current cohort of IE Brown Executive MBA (EMBA) students is on campus this week to take classes and prepare for a visit to South Africa in January.

The students, most of them mid-career executives, are halfway through the 15-month program, which integrates the humanities with management sciences to broaden their perspectives and better prepare them to advance their careers.

While at Brown this week, the students will work with Brown and IE faculty on financial management, political economy of emerging markets, operations and supply chain management, globalization of the arts, and other courses. They will refine the business plans they developed as teams and pitch them to a group of experts at Betaspring, a Providence-based start-up accelerator. Joining them as judges from Brown will be Brendan McNally, associate director of the Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations program, and Jason Harry and Alden Richards from Brown’s Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship (PRIME) program.

The students will prepare for the January visit to Cape Town, South Africa, with a screening of Ndiphilela Ukucula: I Live to Sing, a full length documentary film about African singers who study at the formerly all-white opera school at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Following the screening, they will have a discussion with Julie Cohen, the documentary’s filmmaker, and Kamal Khan, head of the UCT Opera School.

After this session at Brown, the students will continue their studies online and attend another residential session in Madrid. The cohort is scheduled to graduate in May 2015.