International Field Trip to Dubai, Reflection Paper

As a full-time international student about to graduate in a few months’ time, a trip to the Middle East could either prove to be fatal or fruitful in terms of future career aspects in that region. Outside the United States, UAE has emerged as the recent hub for business operations for various reasons – geographical, regulatory, brand name or infrastructure. For the same reason, someone looking to kick-start their career, working in a dynamic environment of the UAE could be very valuable in terms of experience and understanding complexities of business. As the interconnectedness of the world economy has already been established, UAE finds itself to be the epicenter of all the financial action with close proximity to all the major world markets in China, UK, the US, Europe or South Asia. The UAE government bodies and royalty who have followed a very pro-business approach in providing good infrastructure and framework for businesses to operate smoothly and survive in the hot weather.

One of my main reasons for choosing UAE as the option for this field study was to gain an understanding into how a country’s economy which so far was heavily dependent on oil is exploring other means of revenues and creating related to oil or unrelated industries in order to have a sustainable future or for when the oil runs out. I was also excited to understand as to how seven different emirates ruled by seven different royal families with different values, different sets of beliefs and business sense come together as one United Arab Emirates and survive on a whole.

Take anything and make it biggest, tallest and largest; that’s Dubai for you. Deprived of oil like its rich neighboring emirates, Dubai is literally the rags to riches story achieved with real estate, tourism and retail industry on steroids and also the free trade zones established to get more business into UAE. While reading about it, Dubai seemed like the new face of capitalistic society. It has a flare for everything grand and everything that money could possibly buy or make. Dubbed as one of the prime cities to be in the race for being the financial capital of the world, is in the pit against heavyweights such as London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. I wanted to see if Dubai really has what it takes to get to the top or even survive

Upon arriving in Dubai, one can almost sense how real estate has bloomed in Dubai in the last two decades. It is often called as the city with the largest collection of construction cranes but many of those cranes have stopped functioning since the economic meltdown. One thing that Dubai often lacks against major financial capitals is the rich history of financial and trade services that these cities enjoy. After being in Dubai for these many days, if Dubai was a stock option, I would neither buy much new stock nor sell the existing stakes just yet. I would put a weak hold on Dubai stock under constant supervision to be sold off any