The following post was written by Sawako Sonoyama.  I am constantly amazed by the sheer number of events our students have access to.  We will feature more posts soon from some students that have been working on their capstone projects.

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SIPA offers a variety of activities that help equip students with the skills necessary for a successful career. During your two years here, you can be trained in specialized skills such as Monitoring & Evaluation, Conflict Resolution, and Crowdsourcing from experts in the field, while being deeply embedded with the appropriate professional networks. SIPA, however, is not only about acquiring skills and networking, but has rigorous academic caliber as well.

During your two years away from the professional world, you will have the opportunity to be a student again. This is the time to once again bury your selves under thousands of pages of readings, tackle intellectual debates with your colleagues, and absorb pure knowledge from prominent guest speakers in the field of your academic choice.

For example, I attended a talk titled “Race Thinking and the Sciences in French Colonial Vietnam” by Mitch Aso. Aso is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, focusing on environmental change and human health on the rubber plantations of southern Vietnam. His talk focused on how race was created through colonialism via biopolitical mechanisms such as agriculture and medicine. Through rubber production in Vietnam, certain ethnic groups were categorized as being barbaric laborers, even when a mix of ethnicities within Vietnam was conducting the same agricultural practices.

In reaction to the malaria outbreak in Southeast Asia, the colonizers labeled certain ethnicities to be carriers of the disease and attempted to segregate those people. Aso illustrated concrete examples on how the concept of race is extremely complex; it can be created through political and calculative avenues. Racial identity is never concretely defined. The conversation also expanded to the concept of modernity and whether these new agricultural and medical practices actually modernized the indigenous people’s lives. A constant debate amongst anthropologists and philosophers surrounds the exact timing and definition of modernity. Was the western influence that detrimental to revolutionizing the lives of the indigenous communities?

The concept of identity and modernity may be quite abstract and academic to be applied on daily affairs in international relations, however, a solid understanding of such notions are undoubtedly helpful. As an Economic and Political Development concentrator, even though I may never fully understand the philosophy behind how identity shifts when different countries interact with one another, but having some understanding will improve my development practices. In fact, in current development practices, there is still not enough research or analysis being done with regards to the local context or how that will be affected by the development intervention planned. Considering a non-practical and academic mindset may be necessary in thinking about how we conduct these operations.

Going to such talks reminded me of the holistic approach SIPA offers – a combination of rigorous academic research and effective hands-on practice.

Below is some evidence of the choices that SIPA students must sometimes make when it comes to how to spend their time.  There always seems to be something going on at SIPA or on our campus that would be interesting to attend.

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Monday, November 29, 2010

Gender-Based Violence in the Congo
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
Gender Policy
Panel Discussion with Dr. Les Roberts, Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Paula Donovan, Co-Founder of AIDS-Free World; Dr. Susan Bartels, Co-Head of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; and Lisa Jackson, Writer and Director of the film “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.”

Debate: Nuclear Energy and Climate Change
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall, Room 106
Earth Institute
Debate with Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy Studies, former Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy; Peter Bradford, Adjunct Professor, Vermont Law School, former Commissioner, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, former Chair, New York and Maine utility regulatory commissions; Barton Cowan, Visiting Professor, West Virginia University College of Law, of counsel, Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC; Susan Eisenhower, Member, Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future, Chair Emeritus, Eisenhower Institute; Michael Gerrard, Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice, Director, Columbia Center for Climate Change Law

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Kazakhstan’s Refugee Crisis: Violence, Hunger and the Transformation of Broader Central Asia, 1930-1933
12:00 am – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1219
Harriman Institute
Lecture with Sarah Cameron , Post-Doctoral Fellow, Yale University

Japan Circa 1959 – The High-Growth Economy and the Social Effects of Television
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 918
Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Brown Bag Lecture with Yoshikuni Igarashi, Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Kazakhstan’s Refugee Crisis: Violence, Hunger and the Transformation of Broader Central Asia, 1930-1933
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building
Harriman Institute
Lecture with Sarah Cameron, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Yale

DevInfo Training
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 407
New Media Task Force
Workshop with Christina J. Irene, a representative from the joint UNICEF/DevInfo programme, along with the Fall 2010 DevInfo Interns, will present an introduction to the DevInfo data management system.

Brown Bag with Amb. Paul R. Seger, Permanent Repepresentative of Switzerland to the UN
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 802
International Organization Specialization
Brown Bag Lecture with Ambassador Paul R. Seger, Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the United Nations

How Not to Help
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 707
Institute for the Study of Human Rights
Discussion with Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub from “Wronging Rights”.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Lake Baikal, Siberia: Will Industrial Development Destroy the World’s Largest, Cleanest Lake?
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1219
Harriman Institute
Lecture

Czech Foreign Policy After the Fall of Communism
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1512
Harriman Institute
Lecture with Jiri Paroubek

Perspectives on Political and Economic Dynamism in Northeast Asia- Challenges of China and North Korea
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Columbia Univerity Morningside Campus International Affairs Building, Room 918
Center for Korean Research
Lecture with Ambassador Young-Mok Kim,Consul General of Republic of Korea to New York. No registration is required.

Leaders in Global Energy: Dr. Fatih Birol: Critical Factors Shaping the Future Global Energy Landscape
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
School of International and Public Affairs and Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy
Lecture with Dr. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist, International Energy Agency
Register

Tolerance Without Liberalism: Conflict and Coexistence in Twentieth-Century Indonesia
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 801
Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion
Lecture with CDTR Visiting Fellow, Jeremy Menchik

My Perestroika
8:00 pm – 10:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 417
Harriman Institute
Film Screening and Discussion with Robin Hessman. To reserve tickets in advance please follow the link: www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/8563295. Tickets will also be available at the box office in the Lerner Hall Lobby the day of the show.

Concert Series: Italian Harpsichord Music with Andrew Appel
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
The Italian Academy at Columbia, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University
Concert Series with harpsichordist Andrew Appel, violinist Krista Bennion Feeney, and cellist Loretta O’Sullivan, performing the music of Boccherini, Cimarosa, and Clementi

Thursday, December 2, 2010

A Conversation with Adolfo Carrion, Regional Director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
12:00 pm- 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
Urban and Social Policy Concentration
Conversation with Adolfo Carrion, Regional Director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Register

Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919-1945
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1219
East Central European Center
Discussion with Professor Tibor Frank, Eötvös Loránd University, Columbia University, regarding the impulses influencing a uniquely gifted generation of mostly Jewish Hungarian emigrants.

Biological Measures of the Standard of Living North and South of the Border -
4:15 pm – 6:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 802
Institute of Latin American Studies
Lecture: with Prof. Richard Steckel, Distinguished University Professor of Economics, Anthropology and History at Ohio State University.

When China Met Africa and The Colony
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Studio X 180 Varick Street New York, NY 10014
Committee on Global Thought
Film screening / Discussion including two films that examine Chinese investment in Africa
Register

Stories of Stigma, Stories of Strength: Ethnographic Oral History with Sanitation Workers in New York City
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Schermerhorn, Room 754
Oral History Master of Arts Program
Lecture with Robin Nagle. She will present her ethnographic work for her forthcoming book Picking Up.

QMSS Seminar: Sexual Networks and HIV Transmission in a High-Prevalence Setting: Evidence from a Sociocentric Study
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Hamilton Hall, Room 503
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
Seminar with Stephane Helleringer, Mailman School of Public Health

Friday, December 3, 2010

Afghanistan: Prospects for Peace
9:00 am – 5:30 pm
Kellogg Center, International Affairs Building, Room 1501
Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Sixth Annual Arnold A. Saltzman Forum
Register

From a Raindrop to a Stream Pebble to a Delta: Recent Research on Predictive Modeling
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Seeley W. Mudd Building, Room 833
Earth Institute
Lecture with Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Director of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, University of Minnesota
Register

Asia in Africa: New Connections in Historical Perspective
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro Center
Committee on Global Thought
Discussion Panel with Howard French, Deborah Brautigam, Abdoulie Janneh, and Wang Hongyi
Register

Saturday, December 4, 2010

The International Criminal Court in Motion – An Analysis of its Seven Years of Activities and Perspectives with Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor, International Criminal Court
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
International Affairs Building Room 1501
Center for International Conflict Resolution
Lecture with Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Mr. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution.
Register

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Toxica Simulation
9:30 am – 6:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
CRWG and LASA
Simulation allowing participants to engage in a negotiation, observed by negotiation practitioners. Space is limited, RSVP required. Please email Toxica2010@gmail.com.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday, December 6, 2010

From Three-Legged to Two-Legged Races – The Emergence of Women’s Competitive Sports in Japan (1910s-20s)
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 918
Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Brown Bag Lecture with Robin Kietlinski, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, Baruch College; Visiting Researcher, Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Monday, December 6 – Distinguished Lecturer Series “Southern Buddhism: Tracing Later Buddhist Art in South India”
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Knox Hall, Room 208
Southern Asian Institute
Distinguished Lecturer Series with John Guy, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Innovating for Development: A Thought Leadership Forum from the Journal of International Affairs
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
School of International and Public Affairs
Forum moderated by Steven Cohen, Executive Director, Earth Institute, about how innovation is driving the agenda for sustainable development, climate change, natural resource use and energy policy.
Register

Thursday, December 9, 2010

U.S. Rapprochement with Indonesia – From Problem State to Partner
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 918
Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Brown Bag Lecture with Ann Marie Murphy, Associate Professor, School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University; Adjunct Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict Workshop
5:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Columbia University, Teachers College Campus, 525 West 120th Street, Grace Dodge Hall, Room 179
Earth Institute
Lecture

Thursday, December 9, 2010

QMSS Seminar: Political Conditions for Diffusion? Anti-Corporate Movements and the Spread of Cooperatives in America Capitalism
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Hamilton Hall, Room 503
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
Lecture with Marc Schneiberg, Queens College Department of Sociology

Monday, December 13, 2010

Post-Cancun Debriefing
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1512
The Columbia-Paris Alliance Program and the Sustainable Development Doctoral Society
Seminar on the climate change negotiations in Cancun, with Scott Barett, Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics and Laurence Tubiana, Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia

From Wednesday, January 12, 2011 through Friday, January 14, 2011

SIPA Students Only: 35th Annual Washington, DC Career Conference
All Day Event
Washington, DC
Office of Career Services, School of International and Public Affairs
35th Annual Washington, DC Career Conference, a three-day event consisting of 20 panels, employer site visits, networking reception and a day of informational interviews. For further information regarding this event, please contact Joe Musso at sipa.dc.conference@columbia.edu.
Register

I don’t know that any day at SIPA is considered “typical” – to me it seems like every day here is a major conference.  Every bill board in the building is plastered several layers deep with fliers promoting panels, events, and discussions of all sorts.  However, Anesa Diaz-Uda, a second-year MPA student, put the following together to describe a recent day in her life as a SIPA student . . .

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I’ve been spending some time on the Message Board, and thought answering, “What’s a typical day like?” might be helpful.  Well, here’e my schedule from a recent Thursday:

8-11: Capstone Project

My team and I went to the Mexican Consulate to meet with the Consulate General’s Chief-of-Staff.  We were welcomed, and then left the Mexican Consulate to visit the Guatemalan and Peruvian Consulates.  At each Consulate, we went over the various processes, services and products delivered, and met with each respective Consulate General.  It was a fast, but great fact finding mission.  Hopefull we can use the information garnered to offer a fuller comparative study for our final product.

12-2:  Lecture at SIPA with Stiglitz, Patnaik, Sundaran and Lin

I’ve seen Stiglitz a few times, but always enjoy another opportunity to hear about his work.  Here’s a blurb from the website about the lecture I attended.

The Continuing Financial Crisis: Perspectives from the North and the South

Thursday, March 25, 2010, 12:00pm – Davis Auditorium, the Schapiro Center

This talk on “Taking Stock of the Financial Crisis” will feature Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laurette and University Professor at Columbia University; Prabhat Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Founder and Chair of International Development Economics Associates and Board member of the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development, Geneva, and Justin Yifu Lin, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank.

The Heyman Center always has great events, and here’s a link to this specific lecture, but will allow to jump to other resources and events.

http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php?id=166

2-4: Management Seminar with Thoman

This course meets once a week, has 16 students and is typically a round table discussion with Professor Rick Thoman (former Executive Officer at American Express, CFO at IBM CFO and most recently CEO of Xerox).  Professor Thoman also holds three graduate degrees from the Fletcher School at Tufts, so is familiar with the international affairs degree.  He offers keen and honest insight and advice, and it’s been a really enjoyable class.  The course is offered at SIPA, and is called “Managing the Global Corporation.”  Specific topics include:

• Why have Global Companies developed?

• What is the creative destruction model and why is it important?

• What different models exist in this development?

• What is corporate culture and why is it important?

• Why is management talent so critical?

• What are the future trends and issues facing global companies?

• What are business models? How are they specified?

4-5:  Consult with Professor Thoman privately about my final class project, and then head home.

5-6: Walk my dog in Central Park.

6-8: Do some schoolwork while cooking dinner, and eat with my boyfriend.

8:30-10:30: Meet some girlfriends from SIPA to get ready for the SIPASA Spring Fling Party.

11-2: SIPASA Spring Fling Party at Cabana at Maritime Hotel.  It was a blast.

Here’s a link to the hotel’s website:

http://www.themaritimehotel.com/cabanas.html

The Annual Kenneth Arrow Lecture: “Social Choice and Individual Values”

Friday, December 11, 2009, 4:00pm
Altschul Auditorium, 417 International Affairs Building

Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, is the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, and will speak on “Social Choice and Individual Values.” Kenneth Arrow, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Eric Maskin, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics, will serve as Respondents.  SIPA’s Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, will chair.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

George W. Ball Lecture

Kemal Dervis
George W. Ball Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at SIPA and former head of the United Nations Development Programme

Globalization After the Great Crisis of 2008-2009:
Continuity or Fundamental Change?

6:30pm
Kellogg Center, 15^th Floor
International Affairs Building

There are many ways to gather information about SIPA. Our Web site, this blog, and a visit to SIPA are just a few of the ways.

iTunes is another avenue you can use to obtain information about opportunities available to our students. When you open iTunes and visit the iTunes store simply type “SIPA” into the search box and you will find a long list of SIPA lectures, forums, and panels available for download. They are all free and we publish events as they happen so repeat the search on a consistent basis for updates.

Last week at Columbia former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan discussed climate change during his delivery of the Gabriel Silver Lecture at Columbia’s World Leaders Forum. Annan is part of the first cohort of SIPA’s Global Fellows Program, a distinguished group of global leaders, each of whom has played a significant role in designing, shaping, or implementing solutions to critical global problems.

The following description of the event comes from the Columbia News Web site:

The Gabriel Silver Memorial Lectures were inaugurated in 1950 at the School of International and Public Affairs to foster international understanding and world peace. The first lecture was given by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Annan’s talk on climate change coincides with a range of Columbia-hosted events showcasing other leaders on the issue, including Sir Nicholas Stern, noted economist; Denmark’s minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard; and the University’s own experts in climate science and policy.

The Columbia Global Fellows Program was established to bring to campus each year a distinguished group of global leaders, each of whom has played a significant role in designing, shaping or implementing solutions to critical global problems. In May, SIPA Dean John H. Coatsworth announced Kofi Annan as one of three inaugural Global Fellows; the others include Alfred Gusenbauer, former chancellor of Austria, and Tung Chee Hwa, former chief executive of Hong Kong.

You can view a full video of Mr. Annan’s speech by visiting this link.

Just another example of the tremendous access SIPA students have to those who help to shape policy related to international and public affairs.

As mentioned a few weeks ago on this blog, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, visited SIPA and outlined his vision for a new business model in his talk on ” Creating A World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.” The event was co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Human Rights, Center for the Humanities, SIPA’s Economic & Political Development Concentration, and Committee on Global Thought.

We are happy to say that his full talk is available for your viewing.  Simply click here to view the video.  The whole presentation is 71 minutes in length.

The SIPA feature event this week was a talk given last night by author Siddharth Kara. Mr. Kara recently published the book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. The event was hosted by The Southern Asian Institute and is one of 10 events taking place this week.

SIPA students are fortunate to be able to have access to programming such as this through 21 different regional and functional institutes and centers. You can further explore all of these centers by visiting our Institutes and Centers Web page.

Below is a short YouTube Video where Mr. Kara briefly describes his new work, published by Columbia University Press.

One thing that makes it fun be around SIPA is the constant stream of speakers that visit.  It is not uncommon to have the opportunity to attend 15-20 different events per week in our building or on campus.  It is easy to find out what is going on each week, all you need to do is to sign up for a weekly email that goes out with information about activities taking place each week.  Simply visit this site and enter your information.

One highlight of last week was a talk by Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen movement and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.  He is considered a pioneer in the field of microcredit, which provides “micro” loans to the poor to serve as a catalyst for improving their socioeconomic status.

In Bangladesh today, Grameen Bank has nearly 1,100 branches, with over 12,000 staff members serving two million borrowers in 37,000 villages.  Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, the third of fourteen children.  He was educated at Chittagong, and received a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics at Vanderbilt University.  He has served on many committees and commissions dealing with population, health, banking, and international development.  He is the recipient of the World Food Prize, the President’s Award of Bangladesh, and numerous other awards and distinctions.

Picture Credit to Wikipedia

As CNN reported (photo from CNN main page) President Obama recently announced that he has chosen another person with Columbia ties, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, as special envoy for the Middle East.

George Mitchell has a history of involvement with SIPA.  He is a former Senior Fellow at SIPA and conducted lectures and briefings for the Center for International Conflict Resolution.

The speech that Mr. Mitchell gave upon joining SIPA, along with the introduction by the Dean at the time, Lisa Anderson, is available on the Columbia Web site.  As he says in the video, Mitchell’s desire to teach started when he was a college student and spending time at SIPA helped him achieve this goal.

The video shows that Mr. Mitchell’s sense of humor is equal to his ability to navigate tense political negotiations and his comments on the prospects for peace (given in 2002) are very thought provoking considering the role he now assumes with the Obama administration.

Clicking on the picture below will take you to the page where you can view Lisa Anderson’s introduction and Mr. Mitchell’s speech upon joining SIPA.  The announcement of Mr. Mitchell joining SIPA can be found on this page.

There are many ways to gather information about SIPA. Our web site, this blog, and a visit to SIPA are just a few of the ways.

iTunes is another avenue you can use to obtain information about opportunities available to our students. When you open iTunes, simply type “SIPA” into the iTunes search box and you will find a long list of SIPA lectures, forums, and panels available for download. They are all free and we publish events as they happen so repeat the search on a consistent basis for updates.