President's Update: Where We Are Now

Just over four months ago, the master’s and doctoral students at the Ford School of

Public Policy officially selected Cuba as our country of focus for the 2016

International Economic Development Program. In the short period since, our 20

participants – all MPP students, including a few dual MA, MS, MBA, and MSW

students thrown into the mix – have been working hard to plan this year’s program.

What does that entail, you ask? In short, our students have done everything.

Logistically, our committees have risen to the challenge of coordinating the ins and

outs of this entire program. They’ve worked with our amazing faculty advisor to

plan the seven-week course in which we’re all currently enrolled before heading to

Havana, secured funding through grant applications and fundraisers for our 9-day

study tour in Cuba, coordinated with CIEE (our fantastic program coordinator) to

plan everything from transportation on the ground to site visits during our trip,

identified the stakeholders we are most interested in speaking with for our policy

research projects, and developed online platforms to enable our friends and families

to stay updated on our activities (like, oh I don’t know, this blog, Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram [@fordiedp2016], and Snapchat [@fordiedp2016]).

Academically, we’ve split into five groups consisting of four members each to study

distinct policy areas of interest in Cuba. These include: economics & commerce,

education policy, environment & energy policy, foreign policy, and health policy.

We’ll all spend this semester researching these issues and striving to understand the

political, cultural, social, and economic context of Cuba as much as we can before

traveling to Cuba over spring break to augment and add context to our investigation

by speaking with a wide array of stakeholders on the ground.

But I won’t dwell too much on any of those pieces right now; those are the updates

that our committee chairs and policy groups will touch on in subsequent posts.

As of today, we are three weeks into our classroom study and 32 days from our

departure to Miami/33 days from our arrival in Havana (…not that I’m counting

down or anything). We’ve come a long way since the Ford School community

selected Cuba as our destination for this year’s IEDP in September, and since our

participants were first accepted to the program in October, but we’ve still got plenty

of loose ends to tie up in the coming weeks.

The posts we publish here will detail some of how we put this program together, the

challenges we have encountered in doing so, and the core learning processes in

which our policy groups are engaged.

I hope you find this documentation of our program process and experiential

learning to be insightful and engaging. Mentally and intellectually challenging and

overwhelming though it can be to participate in and lead this program at times, each

of the students who will post here has invested her or his time, energy, and mind to

ensure that this year’s IEDP goes off without a hitch (or, with as few hitches as any

program including international travel possibly can, anyway). Why? Because this

program is only as good as we are collectively. And as we stand currently, I have full

faith that our 2016 IEDP to Cuba will be amazing.

Saludos, and happy reading!

Aubrey

acsitler@umich.edu