Off the Farm and Into the Field: Master's Students Practice Hands-on Policymaking
Off the Farm and Into the Field: Master's Students Practice Hands-on Policymaking
The 2022 cohort of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy has been busy this quarter getting out of the classroom and into hands-on policymaking with partner organizations in Tunisia, Estonia, India and beyond.
Every year, students in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy (MIP) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies participate in the Policy Change Studio, a pioneering two-quarter program designed to provide our master's students with the know-how to bring about change in the world.
In 2020, many of the internships and outreach opportunities for our students were reduced or cancelled altogether because of the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2021, most of our students were able to participate in virtual programs with our policy partners. After two years of adapting, we're excited that the 2022 cohort of MIP students once again has the opportunity to work in-person with their partner organizations and meet changemakers on the ground to evaluate and fine-tune the impacts of their policy work.
Keep reading to see where our students have been working around the world.
Tunis, Tunisia
Emily Bauer, Soomin Jun and Kyle Thompson have been in Tunisia working with Wasabi, a communications company, working to understand the root causes of Tunisia’s large informal economy and find incentives for greater formal sector participation.
Pretoria, South Africa
Janani Mohan and Eli MacKinnon have been in South Africa with a local branch of the United Nations Development Programme to work on the longstanding problem of South Africa's highly skewed income distribution and vast disparities in employment access across different regions and social groups.
Jakarta, Indonesia
Sylvie Ashford, Calli Obern, Daniel Gajardo and Sarah Baran traveled to Indonesia to work with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) local branch that is tackling policy barriers to decarbonizing industrial heat sources in the country.
Washington D.C., United States
Eyal Zilberman, Chaeri Park, Me Me Khant and Mikk Raud went from the West Coast to the East to the Washington D.C.-based Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) to identify ways the U.S. government can reduce the prevalence of ransomware attacks against public and private entities.
India
Shirin Kashani, Madeleine Morlino and Amanda Leavell are working with SheThePeople, a female-first digital media website founded by Draper Hills alumna Shaili Chopra, that focuses on women-related journalism.
Tallinn, Estonia
Johannes Hui, Dave Sprague, Bradley Jackson and Arelena Shala partnered with the International Centre for Defense and Security (ICDS), a strategic policy think tank, to investigate the use of sub-threshold, grey-zone and hybrid military countermeasures to deter Russian provocations in the Baltic-Nordic region.
The Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Want to learn more? MIP holds admission events throughout the year, including graduate fairs and webinars, where you can meet our staff and ask questions about the program.
