A recent issue of the Harbus offers a quick glimpse of what a few MBAs have been up to over the past three months. Internships based in the United States (at Major League Baseball, MTV Networks, and the U.S. Treasury Department, among others) provided hands-on learning opportunities for students hoping to test out a special area of interest or potential career path. Others looked abroad, pursuing their interests in solving business and social problems in the developing world.

Canadians Alyza Keshavjee and Ameel Somani spent their summer in Kabul working for Roshan, Afghanistan’s largest telecom provider. “I helped redesign the strategy for M-Paisa, the country’s first mobile money mechanism,” Keshavjee told the Harbus. “Given that 97 percent of Afghanistan’s population is unbanked, M-Paisa represented a unique mechanism by which to bring financial access to the masses.”

Dominique Baillet lived in a tent in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, while working with consulting firm Dalberg to help the U.S. State Department develop a permanent housing strategy to serve the approximately 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake. She’s not the first HBSer to aid in recovery efforts there, nor will she be the last: A student-led Immersion Experience Program (IXP) to Haiti is scheduled for January 2011. Organized by second-year students Andrea Ellwood, Brent Gibson, and Kathleen Hebert, with the assistance of HBS faculty and staff, the 12-day IXP will pair student teams with on-the-ground partner organizations to assist in ongoing relief efforts.

Additional IXP destinations for 2011 include Rwanda, Brazil, China, Vietnam, India, Silicon Valley, South Africa, and Vietnam. (The Bulletin went along on an IXP to Mexico a couple of years ago.) Taken together, the rundown of student summer experiences and the 2011 IXP destination list indicate that HBS students are still looking for ways to leverage their experience in finance, consulting, strategy, and negotiations — but where and how they use those skills reflect the realities of an increasingly global world.

If you were given the gift of a “free” summer as a young MBA student, how and where would you spend it? Any countries you would add to the list of 2011 IXPs? And lest you think all HBS students spent their summers engaged in focused work activities, think again: one Harbus profilee simply traveled around the world.

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