SIPA Students Share their Summer Experiences

The SIPA student body is made up of students from all over the world, and their summer 2019 experiences have been even more diverse. Students could be found in Colombia working on increasing sustainable agriculture, or in Tunisia working on women’s empowerment, to even in New York working at various United Nations governing bodies.

For the students in the MPA-DP program alone, 48 students held positions with 33 organizations in 37 countries across the world, including Nigeria, Poland, Guatemala, and Myanmar. Clara Langevin ’20 and Yerassyl Kalikhan ’21 are two MPA-DP students placed with the World Bank Lake Victoria Challenge and spent their summer learning how cargo drones could help East Africa meet its sustainable development objectives. Yuffie Zhang MPA ’20 interned with the IBM Silicon Valley Lab, which led her to Walt Disney World to meet and network with other IBM interns and speakers from all over the U.S.

Sabaa Notta MPA-DP '20 worked for Lidya, a Series A start-up that offers loans to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) within 24 hours and with no collateral requirements. Samantha Chan, Hannah Dennis, Gregory Francois, and Addie Thompson — all MPA-DP ’20 — and recent graduate Julie Tumasz MPA-DP ’19 spent the summer as story producers with UNDP's Global Programme on Nature for Development, while Delfina Müller MPA-DP ’20 spent her summer in Vanatu working with the International Organization for Migration. Jessica Shaw MIA '20 managed Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Sales for the Federal Government Sales team at Microsoft this summer as George-Ann Ryan MIA ’20 was a Brookings Institute Summer Research Intern at The Hamilton Project.

Read more about SIPA students’ summer experiences in the slideshow below.