We have another guest post on the blog this week! Ujjwala Maharjan is a current IEDP student from Nepal, and is one of the founding members of the Word Warriors, Nepal’s first spoken word poetry group. Do you know those moments in life when you look around your group of friends and you realize that you LOVE these people and you have this urge to … Continue reading Guest Post: I Get by With a Little Help From My Friends
Summaries appear in several ways, though they always depend on the situation. For this internship, they can be formal, shaped into final reports and reflections both written and spoken that are shared with supervisors and professors. As I’ve found with family members, the summary is often confined to a few sentences that use far too many blanket statements. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll have an … Continue reading Internship reflections
I’ve been posting a lot about my experience in grad school (understandable), but not so much on my experience in Philadelphia. Moving from NYC, I wasn’t sure what I would think about Philly, but now I’ve come to see that Penn’s location in the heart of the city is just one more thing that makes the school so great. For one thing, the city is … Continue reading A Grad Student’s Guide to Philly
Well, the final week is over, and I have two days to go before I leave Cambodia. Cue the sentimental music? Well… Though I am saddened to be ending my contract with AAC and saying goodbye to my wonderful coworkers, I don’t necessarily want to dedicate this post to a review of my internship. I simply wanted to further enlighten my readers (all 17 of … Continue reading Work.2
You know the game. Name a movie and within six degrees of connection, in some way it ends with Kevin Bacon. Perhaps the game requires some updating for today’s context, but the principle remains the same, that the world grows smaller every day. I’ve found the Six Degrees principle can even be applied to international development. There are many things that you can learn as … Continue reading Six degrees
It’s very much October. Mother Nature is finally letting us enjoy some crisp weather and fall foliage, meaning that, after months of the stickiness of a long summer, we can fully embrace eating pumpkin-flavored foods and wearing sweaters. What October also means is that it’s very much the middle of the semester. Everyone is walking around with slightly glazed looks, mugs of caffeine glued to … Continue reading Right in the Thick of Things
From my office desk, I can see cars and motorbikes jamming along Preah Monivong Boulevard and the ephemeral downpours soaking the street as I read through Cambodia’s Education Sector Plan for 2014-2018. I’ve grown increasingly familiar with that document: most of my work revolves around analysing policy and the constraints the country’s education system has in implementing it. As I mentioned in my last post, … Continue reading Work
We have a guest post this week! Toffy, who is originally from Thailand, started IEDP right after finishing her undergraduate degree in California. So for those of you still in college considering a graduate degree, this post is for you! (Though I think everyone else will find it useful too!) We’re plummeting into week 7 of the semester and I still have trouble wrapping my … Continue reading Guest Post: The Transition from Undergrad to Grad
Theoretically, looking at my class schedule, I have loads of free time. I mean, ending by 4 PM? No class on Fridays? For those of us coming from a 9-5 (or more likely, a 9 – who knows how long) job, one of your first thoughts as a grad student might be “how will I fill all those empty hours?” Well, it would be very … Continue reading What Does a Grad Student Do All Day?
This past week has been an emotional one, seemingly throwing all of the feelings that one can experience within the span of six days. Writing about it feels like pulling teeth. I go back and forth between wanting to talk about it and not, knowing that sometimes people don’t want to be burdened by the weight of these conversations, especially when happiness and good events … Continue reading Impact
The International Educational Development Program 