Archive for uganda

What will your Capstone Workshop look like?

Here at the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, we’ve kept busy by preparing for a new admissions cycle. Now that it’s August, the SIPA application will be opening soon. Make sure you’re signed up on our mailing list so you can get notified when the application goes live.

As usual, we’ll be posting application tips and advice to the blog throughout the admissions process. One piece of advice we can give for any program is to be specific in your personal statement, and about why you want to not just attend graduate school, but this particular program. For some, this means researching each program’s curricula.

A signature of the SIPA curriculum is the Capstone Workshop. Small teams of students work on these consulting projects, where they apply the theory they learn in the classroom to real-world issues. What can your Capstone look like? You can check out the full list here, and below, Julia Tumasz (MPA-DP ’19) and John Rouse (MPA-DP ’18) went on New York’s MetroFocus to talk about their Private Rainforest Reserves capstone case study film.

Check out the full interview here.

We covered this capstone about clean cooking in Uganda in this post. Here’s the Spring 2018 team that worked on it, along with a (beautiful) writeup on their project.

If you’re preparing to apply to SIPA to start in Spring or Fall of 2019 and want to see certain content on this blog that hasn’t been covered, be sure to reach out and let us know! Submit An Idea by clicking the link at the top or shoot us an email.

 

Capstone Workshop: Improving STEM education in Ghana

A signature of the SIPA curriculum is the Capstone Workshop, a live consulting project on a real-world issue for an outside organization. You’ll work with small consulting teams of other SIPA students under the guidance of an expert faculty advisor.

This is just two of the Spring 2018 workshops out of the 80+ projects each year, and your project could be in the public, private, and nonprofit sector

Building a Hands-on Science Culture Among Ghanaian STEM Teachers

Client: Practical Education Network (PEN)

Based on the finding that one-off teacher trainings alone are not sufficient to enable teachers to implement hands-on science, the Capstone team developed an incentive strategy to increase teacher uptake of in-class activities. The team also made recommendations to improve PEN’s monitoring & evaluation practices, including providing guidance on data collection, analysis, and storage. The team’s final deliverables include toolkits, step-by-step implementation, and measurement guides for immediate incorporation into organization processes. Learn more here.

Clean Cooking Energy Enterprise in Uganda

Client: United Nations Capital Development Fund

In Uganda, only 2% of the population has access to clean cooking technologies while the majority of households rely on biomass to cook, thus making the expansion of the clean cooking sector a major challenge in the country. To fulfill the client’s requests of providing diagnostics to help the companies attract further technical and investment support, the Capstone team undertook background research on the sector, conducted interviews with international organizations and local associations, and took a weeklong field visit to Uganda to meet with local entrepreneurs and produced a set of deliverables, including company prescriptions, company profiles and a website with database feature, to advise them properly on the ways in which they could scale up their efforts. Learn more here.

Check out the full list of SIPA Capstone Workshops here.

What I Did this Summer: Entry #2

Faridah Nassali is a native of Uganda and is entering her second year as an MIA student concentrating in Economic and Political Development.

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What I did for summer…

faridahpictureThis past summer, I worked as an intern at the International Women Tribune Centre in New York. It was a wonderful experience and I worked on various projects on peace building including but not limited to working on Uganda Radio program/drama on Res. 1325 and 1820.

This was on the most interesting part of my projects because reading the role-plays in the drama projects day-to-day life of the communities back home and most especially the stereotype of gender roles. It was more like bringing my community and placing it in a small office in New York.

I also had an opportunity of attending a couple of UN meetings on issues of gender and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). But what was even more interesting was getting a chance to work close to the UN. I met a couple of people, who may be important in my networking and professional development.

"The most global public policy school, where an international community of students and faculty address world challenges."

—Merit E. Janow, Dean, SIPA, Professor of Practice, International and Economic Law and International Affairs

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