A Week in Washington DC!

Chinyere Nwonye, Rocio Perez, Alejandra Rios, Hamzah Yaacob

During our spring break, we headed to DC for a week full of activities and meetings with people pursuing global careers in development and policy,  including many UCLA Luskin alumni. 

We met with representatives from large organizations, such as the World Bank, USAID, and the U.S. State Department. We also met with smaller organizations that are more rooted in social justice principles and more connected with local community needs, such as the Climate Justice Alliance and Fair Trials. The speakers all had varied interests and expertise in policy, planning, social work, and law, which provided our group with an overview of the diverse career options that we have available.

The representatives we met were all passionate people and brought different perspectives about international work. For instance, a representative from BRAC spoke about how the ground-up nature of their work helped secure community support and made their work more effective on the ground. By contrast, USAID serves a broader political mission as it seeks to also hold local governments accountable for the aid it dispenses. In all, our sessions with the speakers exposed us to a variety of international work that differ in scale, reach, and focus.

In addition, some of us networked outside the scheduled programming and met with policymakers in other research areas such as health and labor policy. As some of us prepare to graduate, we enjoyed hearing out their different career journeys and getting career advice.

We also got to explore DC in our free time. For example, we amply discussed DC’s transit system, street design, and  the travel behavior of residents during lunch or over happy hour drinks. We stopped by museums, strolled by parks, and visited memorials. Our trip also coincided with the cherry blossoms’ peak bloom, which made our visit even more special, especially for those of us who had never traveled to DC before. 

Our trip also allowed us to connect with each other since the programs housed at Luskin are often very siloed from each other. We met fellow students across programs and cohort years, allowing us to make connections that normally don’t happen easily back at UCLA.