Nine thousand miles from campus and six weeks on the clock, one group of Terry College students spent their summer honing business skills in Sydney, Australia’s financial capital.

Did they see kangaroos and koalas? Of course. But more importantly, they experienced working in a country where the regulatory environment and business culture are as different from the U.S. as the wildlife.

“Just geographically — being so distant from everyone really pushed me,” said R. Halsey Bosart, a senior finance major. “Comparing it to a big, structured internship program in Atlanta — where you’re in a program with 20 other interns and staying close to home — the independence I had to develop to fully function as a shareholder analyst in Sydney carried a lot of weight. It challenged me and helped me grow.”

Bosart was one of 11 Terry College of Business students who spent six weeks this summer interning in Sydney. They worked at a range of companies, but their experiences shared key themes — relaxed office culture, an international workforce, and business challenges shaped by geography and Australia’s unique history.

While Bosart worked at FIRST Advisers, a 10-person office for investor relations firm, his fellow student Dayton Brantley worked with hundreds of others at high-rise office with Envest, the largest private insurance brokerage in Australia. Both were impressed by the professional but informal nature of their workplaces.

“Even though I was working at a giant firm, it felt like I wasn’t because it was so laid back,” said Brantley, who is studying economics and financial planning. “It was something I’ve never really seen before. Everyone was on the same level. The respect for your leadership is still there, but I sat right across from our chief financial officer. We had the same desk set up. We had the same computer and everything. And he and I would talk about normal life throughout the day.”

Athena Misewicz, who is studying management and public health, found the same egalitarian feel during her six weeks at Previsior, a consultancy serving health tech startups.  

“I was able to work one-on-one with my boss for most of the six weeks, and I was able to use it as a mentorship opportunity,” she said. “My boss was the CEO of the company. That kind of thing you can only do at a small company in a country that has a more relaxed work environment.”

One of the things she noticed was how her American perspective added value to the consultancy’s projects and overall interest in building diverse teams to incorporate different backgrounds and knowledge bases.

“Two of my projects relied heavily on my background of living in the US,” Misewicz said. “My boss specifically said that he thought being from America, and my public health background, would add a lot of value to the projects.”

That focus on international backgrounds is important in Australia since most businesses need to understand and expand to the international market to grow, Misewicz said.

At Bosart’s FIRST Adviser’s office, his coworkers were from India, New Zealand, East Asia, and Britain.

“It’s by design. I remember they told me they valued my perspective then as an American and how it allowed me to look at all these different things from a whole new perspective,” he said. “I think a part of the goals of the executive directors was getting people from different places with different backgrounds to all look at the same thing.”

In turn, working in finance, insurance or health care in a country with a different regulatory and cultural backdrop gave the students a new perspective on their future careers.

“Not only did I push myself out of my comfort zone a lot, but I realized how much more I can handle and how capable I am of doing something that I’ve never done before,” Misewicz concluded. “It pushed me a lot in terms of general life experience but also career experience and exploration — to be thrown into a different country and to figure it out and do the work. It was really an amazing experience.”