During the Summer 2016 term, several undergraduate and graduate students from the economics department at Georgetown and the McCourt School of Public Policy traveled to Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda to work on various development projects. Read about their travels below!
Paula Mian (MPP 2017)
Before boarding the plane to Dar Es Salaam, in beautiful Tanzania, I truly had no idea how much my life was about to change. After having finished my first year in grad school, I was feeling overwhelmed and was more than ready to get away from the student life for a while and dive into a completely new reality.
Kampala, I’ve sacrificed three pairs of shoes to your dusty roads and muddy streets, but this is merely the visible side of the mark you imprinted on me.
By the end of my first year at McCourt, I had begun to fatigue with the numerous studies to read, GDP numbers and health indicators to absorb, finals to study for, and memos to write. Although I enjoyed my coursework, in the sea of textbooks and grades I began to lose sight of my passion for international development. Three weeks into my time in Uganda, I got the opportunity to travel to Eastern Uganda. It was here I was reminded of the importance of the one in a mass of statistics that explain the life of poverty in a country.
From hikes up to lava lakes in the Congo to data collection at insurance companies, my internship this summer in Rwanda has provided me with a wide range of experiences. And while my work in managing the data collection process this summer may not have been quite as exciting as the volcanoes and game parks that I visited, it did give me invaluable experience by allowing me to apply a lot of the research skills I have learned at Georgetown and to see firsthand how field research is conducted.
