The School of Public Policy (SPP) at CEU organized a day-long Passion Project Planning workshop on February 28. Representatives from three Passion Project clients (International Crisis Group (ICG), UN Habitat, and the UN Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide & Responsibility to Protect) traveled to Budapest to meet with teams of SPP students. These students will be spending the next 12-14 months working on their Passion Projects, which are client-driven and student-run, policy-oriented capstone projects that are an integral part of SPP’s MPA program.
“Providing an opportunity for students and their Passion Project clients to work together, face-to-face, is so important,” said Practitioner in Residence and Passion Projects Program Director Jenny Choi-Fitzpatrick. “It brings their projects to life and allows students to ‘learn by doing.’” The students agreed. “During the course of the day,” explained Lucia Sobekova (MPA ’16), “we nailed down the basics of our project (Drawing Lessons from 20 Years of Conflicts and Post-Conflict Transitions Worldwide), and agreed on the next steps. “ One of the “next steps” that she and her teammates (Corina Ajder, Suluck Lamubol, and Ilija Prachkovski, all MPA ’16) agreed on is a field trip to Kosovo during the spring term to get more insights from Crisis Group officers and others about the conflict in Kosovo. ICG Vice President Jon Greenwald, who was a visiting professor at SPP in fall 2014, has worked closely with the ICG Passion Project team for months.
This was the first visit to Budapest for UN Habitat’s Liz Paterson, and her first opportunity to meet in person with Passion Project team members Nuruddin Ahmed, Balint Nemeth, and Shaileshwori Sharma, all MPA ’16. “We have a lot of work to do on our project (How Urban Mobility and Space Affect Youth Unemployment),” said Nemeth, “but my teammates and I have a much deeper understanding now of what we’re doing.”
The two-person team (David Hughes and Nvard Loryan, both MPA ’16) working with the UN Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide & Responsibility to Protect on Preparedness to Prevent Atrocity Crimes in the Caucasus Region gained valuable insight from Davide Zaru from the UN Office about how to conduct a conflict analysis, and how to apply it to their project. “This was so useful for us,” said Loryan.
“This was a useful and gratifying experience for me too,” said SPP Founding Dean Wolfgang H. Reinicke. “I learned a lot listening to our students and to our three guests as they reflected on what they had learned, and how they benefited from the chance to meet together. My sense was that everyone came away at the end of the day energized and reassured, all key outcomes at this point in the Passion Project.”
