David Wylie
MBA candidate ’12
Served in Republic of Georgia (2007–09) and in Uganda (2009–10)

For David Wylie, service in the Peace Corps was an eye opener and a game changer.

As an undergraduate at Grinnell College, he studied laboratory neuroscience and had visions of becoming a scientist. But after three years as a business/social entrepreneurship volunteer in the Peace Corps—helping farmers in postrevolutionary Georgia form cooperatives and get training in small-business development, and assisting Ugandan refugees as they returned home after that country’s civil war—he enrolled at the University’s Tippie College of Business to seek an MBA.

“Georgia was making itself an open economy, and it was transforming lives, really improving the quality of life for its residents. I hadn’t thought about business before, or seen firsthand the value of business,” he says. “Now, I want to go back overseas and help new businesses build technology in emerging markets. And I definitely plan to volunteer in the Peace Corps again.”

Lessons learned in the Peace Corps, Wylie insists, will serve him for life.

“You get a whole different worldview that makes you realize how interconnected the world is—when something happens in one region, you see how it affects people in other regions,” he says. “I learned how to build relationships with people, and how to understand things from their perspective. A lot of farmers in Georgia, for example, had negative feelings about cooperatives, and I really had to get to know them first—sit with them in their living rooms and have tea—before I could convince them of the benefits. That skill is important in business as well as in life.”

The Pennsylvania native says he knew in high school that he wanted to serve in the Peace Corps. An influential teacher was a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and Wylie already had a strong desire to live in a foreign culture.

“The Peace Corps provides opportunities to do things you’d never do otherwise,” he says. “You learn how to learn quickly, act quickly, and think on your feet. I think all Peace Corps volunteers learn that.”

One experience Wylie wasn’t expecting involved the world’s largest land animal.

“In Uganda, I worked on a project dealing with human-elephant conflict,” he explains. “As elephants were migrating from northern Uganda to southern Sudan, they were eating crops and trampling the houses of those people returning, so we worked with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to mitigate the problem. I hadn’t seen an elephant outside of a zoo.”