Our Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) students are graduating from the University of British Columbia ready to shape a better world. The 20-month professional MPPGA program has supported them to realize their potential as the next generation of informed, globally-minded policymakers.
Graduate Program Director and Professor George Hoberg stated: “Congratulations to our MPPGA Graduates, Class of 2022! We’re so proud of your accomplishments over these past 20 months. The pandemic brought its own unique challenges but the way you continued to come together to engage with each other and with your professors, as well as continue your learning outside of the classroom, is remarkable. The ability to be flexible and creative in the face of new and changing situations, along with the skills, knowledge, and networks you’ve nurtured throughout the program, provide a strong foundation for you to grow and excel in your policy careers. Stay in touch. And welcome to the MPPGA alumni community!”
We are proud to celebrate our MPPGA Class of 2022 and feature four recent graduates, Lindsey Wall, David Markwei, Jemimah Ogundele, and Claire Louise Okatch. They have already influenced policy change within their Global Policy Projects and gained real-world skills in paid work terms and case competitions. Learn about their most memorable experiences in the program, what issues they are most passionate about, their career aspirations, and their advice for future MPPGA cohorts below.
My most memorable moment in the MPPGA program was competing in the National Annual Public Administration Case Competition in first year with a team of my classmates. Over the winter reading break, our team of four prepared a policy briefing presentation on an emerging and highly relevant Canadian policy challenge – reforming long-term care for seniors in Canada. We had the opportunity to present our work to a panel of judges, including high-level decision makers (even a former Deputy Minister!) from the Canadian federal government. We were also able to meet and network with other students from public policy programs across the country.
What made the event even more memorable was that it was entirely online, as it occurred in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite having never met in person it was amazing how well our team connected and was able to work together. When we were able to finally meet in person in September 2021, it was so great to be able to reflect on what we had worked on together the previous winter!
2) What local and/or global issues are you most passionate about? How has the MPPGA program helped you gain the skills and knowledge to address these issues?
I am highly passionate about public health and using health policy as a tool to advance development. Throughout the MPPGA program I’ve had many different opportunities to build up my knowledge and skills in these areas.
For example, throughout my degree I was able to tailor my course assignment topics to my interests and use my course assignments to develop my health policy skill set. I’ve had the opportunity to learn about a huge variety of health topics ranging from primary healthcare policy in Ecuador to reproductive health policy in Sudan.
I also had the opportunity to focus on health policy in my Global Policy Project in second year. Our team researched the application of a concept known as “One Health” in health policy in South and Southeast Asia, and prepared recommendations for how it could be implemented here in British Columbia. Our team presented our findings and recommendations to our client, Genome BC, a research and genomics focused non-profit organization.
Finally, I was able to connect with MPPGA professors and alumni who research and work in health policy and build up my network of contacts who are engaged in this field.
3) What are your career aspirations and next steps post-graduation?
In my career I want to be able to use my knowledge, creativity, and skills to make positive changes to health policy and contribute to more equitable health outcomes for all, whether I’m working at the local, regional, national, or international level.
Currently I’m working at Global Affairs Canada as a Development Officer in the Middle East and North Africa bureau. My team manages a diverse portfolio of humanitarian and development aid projects, in which we collaborate with Canadian, international, and UN organizations. I also get to engage on a variety of foreign policy issues related to our programming, analyze trends and emerging events in the region, and brief senior-level decision-makers to support broader departmental objectives.
I’m so glad to be working with this team, it’s been a great professional development experience, and I’ve really been able to utilize what I learned in the MPPGA program. I’m excited to see where the role takes me next!
4) What advice do you have for our current and future MPPGA students?
My main piece of advice would be to build relationships with your cohort members. Everyone who comes to the program has different experiences, insights, and connections to offer, and when you graduate your cohort will become the core of your professional network.
MPPGA provides lots of opportunities to network and connect with one another, but also make sure to take those extra steps in and out of class to work with different people on projects, have coffee meetings, work on a passion project outside of school. You never know where a connection could lead!
My most memorable moment was participating in the Global Policy Project (GP2) Symposium and presenting on the issue of mitigating bias and unfair outcomes from the use of data within national security contexts. After working hard on the various components of the GP2 with my teammates over the full eight months of the academic year, it was extremely gratifying to share our findings and recommendations to our client as well as a very supportive audience of our cohort mates, staff, and faculty within the SPPGA.
Admittedly, I was a bit intimidated by the GP2 Symposium prior to starting my final year. However, the sheer amount of work my teammates did throughout the eight-month process, from conducting research, to interviewing stakeholders, to performing data analysis, prepared us very well for the event. I think the Symposium is a critical feature of the MPPGA program for students and other members of the SPPGA community as it provides a tangible opportunity for MPPGA students to demonstrate how much growth and development they experience as young policy professionals from the beginning of their first year up until the end.
I will forever be very grateful to Professor Julian Dierkes and Corrin Bulmer for their guidance, patience and expertise in helping us succeed with the Global Policy Project as its lead facilitators.
2) What local and/or global issues are you most passionate about? How has the MPPGA program helped you gain the skills and knowledge to address these issues?
The issue I am most passionate about relates to highlighting and addressing inequities within the use of data and advanced analytical technologies in both the public and private sector. We are in a golden age of innovation as more sophisticated tools that rely on artificial intelligence, machine learning models and algorithms are launched virtually every year. However, there is a gap in existing policy and legislation to regulate the use of these tools which has created a risk of them further perpetuating structural inequalities against marginalized communities. Data can be a powerful tool to help us understand the needs of underserved communities and how to support them. But we need good policy developed in collaboration with members of those communities to achieve this outcome.
I was fortunate to take a number of courses in the MPPGA program that sparked my interest and help me build skills to contribute to this issue such as Measurement and Data Analysis for Policy with Professor Kai Ostwald, Policy Analysis and Evaluation with Adjunct Professor Grace Jaramillo, and the Global Policy Project course facilitated by Professor Julian Dierkes and Corrin Bulmer.
3) What are your career aspirations and next steps post-graduation?
My career aspirations lie at the intersection between equity, technology and policy. There has been an encouraging push in recent years to understand the role of data in building better outcomes for diverse communities both locally and globally. For example, here at UBC, the Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force recently released a comprehensive report in which it underlined the importance of collecting disaggregated data on the lived experience of IBPOC members of the community to measure progress and identify needs in a more granular way.
Earlier this month, the Government of British Columbia also introduced the Anti-Racism Data Act with the purpose of identifying and addressing systemic racism in provincial government programs and services. A dream of mine would thus be to work as an analyst, consultant or advisor on initiatives such as these. To do this, I am currently undergoing a process of translating my qualitative skills in research and policy analysis and further strengthening my quantitative skills in areas such as data analysis, evaluation and survey methods.
4) What advice do you have for our current and future MPPGA students?
The advice I would give current students is to be patient and enjoy the experience of the MPPGA program as much as possible. It can be difficult to go through the workload of the course components and try to develop your career goals at the same time. This also creates a considerable amount of pressure that takes one out of the journey of being in school perhaps for the final time, discussing complex issues and connecting with brilliant classmates and faculty from around the world. So I would just encourage current students to maximize their time in the program, take care of themselves as much as possible and find every opportunity to enjoy this unique time in their lives.
For future students, my advice is to spend some time thinking about what their career goals are and how the MPPGA program can facilitate that journey for them. The program is definitely a challenge to get through so it helps to at least have a preliminary plan for what you want to accomplish and contribute to the policy field as an MPPGA student.
My most memorable moment was when I got the opportunity as the President of the MPPGA Student Association to sit in on the Director's table for the school in my final year. While I learned more about the inner workings of the school, I got an understanding of how a board made decisions. Also, I got to know some of the faculty and staff that are members of these meetings, participated in some key decisions, and improved my soft skills. The opportunity to advocate for students' needs and bring attention to areas that would help student experiences in the school allowed the student association to meet some of its goals.
2) What local and/or global issues are you most passionate about? How has the MPPGA program helped you gain the skills and knowledge to address these issues?
I am very interested in migration issues. The program's courses really helped me understand the different policies at work in the migration field and how they may improve or limit the scope of policy implementation in this area. The opportunity to work on mini-projects, group work and policy reports gave me the skills needed to succeed in my internship as a Junior Professional Consultant with the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Without some of the topics discussed in class, I would not have acquired some fundamental knowledge or been aware of some instrumental tools in completing work assignments during my internship. Furthermore, the ability to work with a real-life client in one of our courses taught me the skills needed to address and identify an issue they had, which helped prepare me for our Global Policy Project.
In my migration policy class with Professor Dan Hiebert, I was taught to think of migration policy through different lenses, identify gaps, and understand the Canadian government's framework in addressing immigration issues within and outside the country. Thus, this has increased my overall understanding of migration policy.
3) What are your career aspirations and next steps post-graduation?
The knowledge gained in my migration policy class was useful in securing a job with the federal government. I recently started my dream job as a Junior Policy Analyst with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in the International and Intergovernmental Relations Branch. I will focus more on policies surrounding immigration in Canada and contribute to the policies that affect the daily lives of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Canada. I look forward to growing in this role.
4) What advice do you have for our current and future MPPGA students?
Do not disregard the small opportunities. No opportunity is irrelevant, as you never know where it will lead or the doors it may open. Moreover, I made a decision upon starting the program that I would network with as many alumni and analysts in the field, and it paid off many times over. I got the opportunity to meet talented individuals and improve my networking skills. The job opportunities I got during the program were through my networks and how proactive I was in maintaining those relationships.
Also, it pays to have a very good elevator pitch that describes who you are, your goals and interests.
Although it would have sounded crazy to me at the time, one of the most memorable experiences for me was the book club we had once a week as part of our Economics class. We read different chapters of Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The weekly discussions had me learning (and arguing) with my book club group on issues that spanned the globe. One minute everyone in my group had an opinion on Vision2030, a development agenda the Kenyan government is working toward and the next minute we were in very in depth conversation about the farmer protests in India.
The spirit of the group encapsulated what I believed to make the best relationships in this field; those that are framed around constantly pushing each other to consider new viewpoints and critically thinking about how new bits of information help us reshape our responses and actions. It was a bonus I met and got to know one of my classmates Prajna Singh through this experience; a friendship that has been such a cornerstone of my time in the program.
2) What local and/or global issues are you most passionate about? How has the MPPGA program helped you gain the skills and knowledge to address these issues?
I came into the program really passionate about learning how to create policy that was more responsive to equity issues, especially those of gender and race. I followed this passion in the numerous assignments that solely took on a gender focus, authoring a Gender+ research guide for use across UBC and working on these issues in my internship at UNDP Cambodia over the summer of 2021. I was able to do this because of the incredible mentorship I received from faculty and staff.
I would especially like to highlight my experience as a Work Learn student at the Office of Regional & International Community Engagement (ORICE). Having Tamara Baldwin as my mentor was the opportunity of a lifetime. Tamara modeled a critical component of mentorship that minority students often struggle with in academia, which is someone who approaches learning with care and gives space for the whole person to show up at work. Additionally, working at ORICE gave a rare opportunity to publish a great body of work while working with graduate students across different disciplines. This grounded my work in other streams of knowledge such as the resources by the Indigenous Research Support Initiative among others.
3) What are your career aspirations and next steps post-graduation?
Working on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Global Policy Project (GP2) really showed me just how important equity conversations are across all industries. They are even more pertinent given our shift to and reliance on technology with the pandemic. I want to be part of that conversation so I’ll hopefully be working in technology policy in some shape or form five years from now.
4) What advice do you have for our current and future MPPGA students?
Being open to trying new things and challenging yourself can be such a rewarding experience. If anyone had told me that I would take a class on Science, Technology and Public Policy or done by GP2 with the CSIS team, I would never have believed them. It was so outside what I thought I was good at or wanted to do. I am still surprised I passed and excelled in that class. I am even more surprised that I feel confident to explore the technology policy world. But all this came from taking a risk and enjoying the breadth of the opportunity I had.
For students of color and maybe in particular any black women doing the program, I would remind them how brilliant and deserving they are. You deserve to take up space and use your voice, in the classroom and outside of it. I show up into all spaces like this and just wait for people to catch up because I know it to be true.