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MIIS French Professor Michel Gueldry keeping busy
MIIS Professor Michel Gueldry has had, and continues to have, a very busy semester. As a French language studies professor at MIIS, Gueldry specializes in international relations and sustainability studies. Just this year, Gueldry has completed and submitted three articles for publication: a new research paper entitled “Energy and Climate Change: The Emergence of an Overarching Security Nexus,” an essay entitled “Personal Transformation and Worldly Engagement: When Mindfulness Meets the Market,” and a paper entitled “Ecological Economics: An Alternative Grand Narrative for Capitalism and a Blueprint for a Sustainable Economy.”
Besides submitting three papers for publication, Gueldry will participate in Peter Fordos‘ student weekend workshop, “Intercultural Competence for Sustainability,” on March 29. His contribution to this workshop is a segment called “How to Communicate Climate Change for Diverse Audiences: Engaging Stakeholders across Professional Cultures.” On April 8, Gueldry will also co-teach a workshop for students with CACS Advisor Edy Rhodes. The workshop is called “Emotional Intelligence: The Tip of the Iceberg.”
Gueldry’s busy schedule will continue into the summer. He will teach three panels at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in July 2014: one on energy policy, one on narratives of capitalism, and one on personal transformation and professional growth.
Congratulations to Professor Gueldry on all of his accomplishments!
Anonymous Donor Pledges $2 Million to Support Immersive Learning Opportunities, Endowment
The Monterey Institute has received a $2 million gift pledge from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. The gift will be divided equally between support for the Institute’s unique immersive learning programs, which provide real-world professional opportunities for students as part of their academic experience, and the school’s endowment, which provides general support for all Institute activities.
The donor stated their hope that this gift “will give more students access to the immersive learning program, and also increase the funds available to support the Institute’s core needs such as financial aid and faculty development.” The donor is the grandparent of a current Monterey Institute student, and is also the grandparent of a recent graduate of Middlebury College.
“We are extremely grateful for this generous and visionary gift, which will allow us to expand opportunities for both students and faculty at the Monterey Institute,” commented President Sunder Ramaswamy. “Immersive learning is one of the signature elements of a Monterey Institute education, and this gift will allow us to explore new opportunities for our students to learn in the field as well as the classroom while enrolled here.”
Employers from Around the World Flock to Recruit at MIIS Career Fair
The opportunity to recruit Monterey Institute students and graduates drew 92 employers from all over the world to the Monterey Conference Center Friday for Career Fair 2014 on February 28. Organizations attending included global brands Apple, Driscoll’s, eBay and Honda, non-governmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the United Nations Development Programme, language specialists like LanguageLine and Transperfect, and government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of State.
The fair offered Monterey Institute students the opportunity to meet employers, learn about job opportunities, distribute resumés, and set up interviews. Some employers started the day before the fair, hosting information sessions and talking with students. MIIS alumna Sally Young (MATI ’99) flew in from Geneva to recruit candidates for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). She appreciates the quality of MIIS candidates from the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation and Language Education, in particular their “attention to detail, passion to keep learning, and desire to do in-depth research.” MIIS graduates make up half the full-time staff in her office and MIIS students also fill about half of the internships offered at any point in time.
“Every year, the Institute’s career fair attracts some of the top international employers in the U.S. and the world,” commented Institute President Sunder Ramaswamy. “It’s a direct reflection of how they view our graduates—as exceptionally capable international professionals who are equipped to hit the ground running and make a difference immediately.”
A complete list of participating employers can be found here.
Student’s Team El Salvador Experience “Connected the Dots…Now I Have More to Offer”
Since its inception in 2006, Team El Salvador has provided 105 Monterey Institute students with the opportunity to hone their development and language skills while making a meaningful contribution to the lives of people in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. This January, nine MIIS students were joined by two Middlebury students and, for the first time, a student from California State University, Monterey Bay.
Faculty director Adele Negro is the glue that keeps Team El Salvador together, but each year the leadership of projects is in the hands of students. The student-driven leadership model is, according to Negro, a key component of the program’s effectiveness. Another important factor is the consistency and longstanding partnership that has been developed and nurtured over the years with the two community partner organizations in El Salvador, la Coordinadora and the Mangrove Association.
This year, the students worked on four major projects:
- The “PLAS” Project, to help improve the functionality and implementation of the Local Sustainable Resource Utilization Plan.
- The Microcredit Project, to strengthen the administrative system of the NGO’s microcredit program under a new profit-based organization in order to improve its sustainability.
- The Public Spaces Project, to assess community perception and utilization of spaces and structures so as to answer the question: ”What makes for a strong, healthy, cohesive community?”
- A Photojournalism Project, to capture in visual and narrative forms the history, experiences and people characterizing the evolution of an eight-year relationship developed between Team El Salvador and its partners.
Many Monterey Institute alumni have spoken about the transformative effect their Team El Salvador participation has had on their studies and careers. Lauren Lambert (MAIEP ’15) appears to have a similarly meaningful experience: “While I have lived abroad on and off throughout my entire life, the three weeks I spent working in El Salvador contextualized what I am doing here at MIIS in a way that nothing else could have.” It “connected the dots,” and clarified how she can make the most of her time at MIIS, so that when she leaves she can have a more profound impact on what she sees as our shared “project human” – to leave this world a better place than when we arrived.
Class Transforms MIIS Student’s Concept of International Development, Opens Up Career Opportunities
Xiao’ou Zhu (MAIPS ’14) says she has always been interested in international development work, but that she had a very narrow view of what that meant until she came to the Monterey Institute. Her view before could best be described as a “brick and mortar” view of development involving official development assistance (ODA) and infrastructure support. That all changed when she took Professor Nukhet Kardam’s Development Theory and Practice class; “it opened a window into the possibilities of international development,” says Xiao’ou.
“For me the most interesting lessons were connected to sustainability and the importance of community involvement,” says Xiao’ou, who along with two other students from the Development Practice and Policy program, Sarah White (MAIPS ’13) and Abdul Khabir Mirzakhail (MPA ’14), worked on a proposal for a small-scale irrigation project in Ethiopia for a non-governmental organization. “It was a perfect team,” Xiao’ou says happily, explaining that they each brought different expertise and experience to a project they all believed to be applicable to their future careers.
More recently, when Xiao’ou applied for a very competitive internship at the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, she included their paper as a sample of her work. “I was thrilled when they contacted me and said they were very impressed with the paper!” She was offered a management role in a World Bank agriculture project in China but could not accept, as it would have meant a six-month commitment and she wanted to complete her studies at MIIS. Instead, she decided to join the Frontier Market Scouts program and work on a summer project in Sri Lanka.
Xiao’ou’s decision to decline the internship surprised officials in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, but they continued to be interested in her work and contracted her to work on a research project for them while in Sri Lanka. “So I ended up with two simultaneous internships!” Xiao says, adding that she is working on the deliverables for the ministry as part of a directed study with Professor Wei Liang.
Learn One Language, Teach Another: ESL Students Lead B.U.I.L.D. Language Classes
Four students in the Intensive ESL program at the Monterey Institute are taking a broad view of language learning by volunteering to teach beginner courses in their native languages at the same time they are working to improve their own English language skills.
“I believe that it will be very helpful to us in our studies,” says Pablo Mezquita from Spain, who enrolled in the Intensive ESL program to prepare for a graduate degree program in international business law in the United States. He, along with Ayumi Kawano of Japan, Gin Wang of Taiwan, and Guldana Khamzina of Kazakhstan, have volunteered to be a part of the B.U.I.L.D (Beyond YoUrself in Language Development) student club on campus and offer free language lessons in their native Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.
Ayumi has aspirations to become a language teacher and would love to enroll in the Teaching a Foreign Language program at MIIS. She thinks she might imitate some of the techniques her English teachers use in her Japanese class. Guldana would like to study international policy, preferably at MIIS, but Gin has not quite made up her mind about what direction to take her studies. Fluency in English at a high level is an important factor in each of their future career dreams.
The four have varied opinions about the mild coastal weather in Monterey, but all agree that it is an exceptionally good place to make new friends. The language classes and participation in student club activities they say, is a great way to meet even more people.
All B.U.I.L.D. classes are listed on the Monterey Institute events calendar.
Student Teams Compete in MIIS Water Innovation Challenge
As our motto, to “be the solution,” indicates, a Monterey Institute degree involves much more than classroom theory. Monterey Institute students have numerous opportunities via immersive learning experiences to develop their professional skills by completing fieldwork and working on real-life issues as part of their class assignments. This spring semester, a group of faculty and staff from across the Institute has launched an innovation challenge for teams of students willing to tackle a true wicked problem.
The challenge, Nor Any Drop to Drink? – Securing the Future of Monterey County’s Fresh Water Supply, involves participating in a series of stakeholder conversations and workshops and working with teams to come up with solutions to a problem that is at once very local and yet global in its wickedness. As Professor Kent Glenzer of the Development Practice and Policy program says, it serves three main purposes: “First, it promotes interdisciplinary work among students, and stretches them to look across degree silos. Complex problems don’t lend themselves to single-discipline solutions. Second, it gives students a real-world laboratory for trying out what they are learning in the classroom. And third, it allows students to engage with local stakeholders – the powerful and the excluded – and forces them to find solutions that are acceptable by many. And it’s a great networking opportunity to boot!”
Ten teams have risen to the challenge and started to interact with stakeholders and experts. They have been tasked with coming up with ideas that are:
- sustainable across future generations
- progessive regarding economic growth
- affordable,
- socially,economically and politically just, and
- compelling to local stakeholders
A panel of external judges will select winners in late April. The team with the idea deemed best by the judges will receive a monetary award of $2,500.
Peru Practicum: Breaking Down Barriers Between Classroom and Real-World Development
Twenty-five Monterey Institute students are taking part in a year-long development practicum experience that includes a fall semester course on policy analysis and project design, a research trip to Peru in January, and a spring semester course focused on data analysis and crafting a final report. Five MIIS professors took an introductory policy analysis course and turned it into an optional year-long immersive learning opportunity. Students have the option to enroll in a Peru-focused policy class in the fall, design a research project, conduct in-field research as part of a winter-term practicum in Peru, and then follow up by working with the information and data collected as part of a seminar in the spring, all while they are learning the tools of data analysis.
Linking faculty research, alumni activities, and students’ desire for practical learning experiences, this is a true MIIS community collaboration. It started with Professors Robert McCleery and Philip Murphy, who have been working on research on the links between poverty and isolation, and grew through connections with the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development, a non-profit co-founded by alumni Aaron Ebner (MPA ’11) and Adam Stieglitz (MPA ’11) that is working on community development projects in the isolated Sacred Valley of Peru.
Professor Jeff Dayton-Johnson and his team of 25 International Policy Studies and Master of Public Administration students looked at several dimensions of connectivity as it relates to a poor rural economy like that of Andean Peru. That included roads, telecommunications, connectivity to public services like health care and education, and connectivity via language (while the national language of Peru is Spanish, Quechua is the language spoken by most of the people in the study area).
Five students—Mario Guzmán-Soria, Josefina Lara, Luz Vázquez Ramos, Ximena Ospina, and Rafael Hernández—presented a preliminary report on major themes and initial findings to local authorities in Calca before returning to Monterey. Says Professor Dayton-Johnson about the experience: “This student-organized and delivered presentation in Calca effectively breaks down the barriers between the classroom and the real world of development practice. Our students took advantage of this opportunity to share initial findings from a field research project they had designed and carried out, to respond to policy makers’ questions, and to strengthen the relationship between MIIS and this region of Peru. I’m very proud of them and look forward to building on their work with another group of students next J-Term!”
MIIS Students Advance to Regional Finals for Million-Dollar Hult Prize for Social Benefit Ventures
The Hult Prize is described as “the world’s largest student competition and start-up platform for social good.” This year, more than 10,000 teams from 350 universities in 150 countries sent in proposals focusing on the 250 million slum dwellers suffering from chronic diseases. In January, a team consisting of five MIIS students, Amanda Boyek (MAIPS ’14), Natalie Cox (MPA ’14), Amitay Flores (MAIPS ’14), Maria Kovell (MPA ’14), and Amy Ross (MPA ’14) got word that they had advanced to the regional finals in San Francisco.
The MIIS team’s proposal is centered around improving youth nutrition and they are now hard at work preparing for the next stage which will take place on March 7 and 8 in San Francisco. “The Hult Prize competition is a unique opportunity to fully develop our ideas into a feasible plan for action,” says Natalie Cox, “and also a chance to see perspectives from students around the world.” Other regional finals will be held in Boston, London, Dubai, Shanghai and Sao Paulo at the same time. One winning team from each host city will move into a summer business incubator, with the final round hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative at its annual meeting in September of this year.
“We are very proud of the Monterey Institute team,” says President Sunder Ramaswamy. “The Hult Prize competition challenges them to put into practice many of the concepts and techniques they have been learning here, and we are delighted to have them represent MIIS in the regional finals.”