On May 8 and May 12, teams of graduating MPA students presented their Passion Projects. A required and important component of the two-year MPA program, Passion Projects are client-driven and student-run, policy-oriented capstone projects. Students work in teams together with a partner to address challenges, identify opportunities, and/or conduct research on a pressing social question.
Student teams summarized their projects and described both the achievements and the challenges that they had encountered during their 17-month journey. Practitioner in Residence and Passion Projects Program Director Jenny Choi-Fitzpatrick summed it up well in her opening remarks noting that while the Passion Projects had “brought out the best, the worst, and sometimes both,” the students’ achievements and learning were significant.
Despite some challenges, students agreed that they were better prepared for the professional world because of the Passion Project experience because it had given them the opportunity to work on a “real-world” project, to hone their technical and analytical skills, and to engage with networks of practitioners working on issues that they cared about.
One especially enthusiastic Passion Project team worked with Freedom Now on a project to mobilize EU institutions and individual EU member states on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Eszter Kajtar, Ciprian Nodis, and Marija Stojanovska Rupcic, all MPA ’15, prepared a document that they hope will be used by Freedom Now for future advocacy planning and to develop general strategies for partnering with European stakeholders.
Commenting on a different Passion Project, which is featured in this video, Matteo Pellegrini, head of capacity development at NRGI applauded the student team (Dursunjemal Halimova, Dennis Owaraga, and Robert Papp) that “helped develop a sophisticated, action-oriented analysis of youth engagement on extractive sector governance in Myanmar, with concrete recommendations for our country level work.” Pellegrini said that it was especially valuable for NRGI to host Halimova as a summer intern in the Myanmar office. “This provided additional opportunities to meet, consult, and survey youth in the country, beyond adding valuable support to our country office at a time of staff transitions. This was overall a very fruitful collaboration that I would highly recommend to other organizations,” said Pellegrini.
“This type of feedback is gratifying,” said Choi-Fitzpatrick. “I am proud of all of our students and what they have accomplished.”
You can find a list of all the 2013-15 Passion Projects here.