EPD Workshop Notes COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - SIPA Admissions Blog

EPD Workshop Notes COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - SIPA Admissions Blog Workshops are a very popular part of the SIPA experience and many of our students are currently knee deep in their projects.   Last week Lacey Ramirez submitted a workshop post and now here another submitted by Beatriz Guillen. ____________________ As you have read in previous posts, the workshop project is one of the most exciting things while you are at SIPA. The Economic and Political Development Workshop is a five month consulting project on development issues. We work with a broad variety of clients: from UN agencies, to developing countries’ governments, NGOs, etc. In a nutshell, the workshop is structured as follows: you do much of the research and planning in New York and then travel twice to the country to do some field work.   Half of the group travels during the winter break, and half during the Spring break. By last week, almost all the teams had returned from their destination countries after their first trip. Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Chile and Jamaica were among the 15 different countries where students traveled. These days everyone is eager to tell their stories about adventures abroad. The EPD department organized a session with all the workshop participants, where we could share not only pictures and fun stories, but also challenges and lessons learned. We were amazed at the great lengths that people who traveled went to in order to stay in contact with the part of the team that stayed in New York: from climbing to a tree to reach some cell reception, to driving around Addis Ababa to get an Internet connection to Skype with the rest of their team members. Below, there are some pictures from the team that traveled to Jamaica and from one of the teams that traveled to Ethiopia. The new market at Kingston In a rural village in Ethiopia