PRACTICUM SEQUENCE
One of the central goals of the MPP Program is to prepare students to be effective practitioners of policymaking, and to understand the problems of implementation common to working situations. To integrate the analytics and the substance, students participate in a sequence of “practice” courses.
All students are required to intern in a public or private agency for a minimum of 300 hours. The purpose of these internships is to give students real-world experience in the policy arena of their chosen area of concentration. Students work with faculty to develop a placement consistent with their own career objectives, and throughout the internships students remain in touch with their faculty advisers. To see a list of student internship placements from 1996 through 2008 click here.
In addition, each student has the option to prepare a thesis during the second year of the program. The thesis can take a number of forms. At the quantitative end of the continuum, for example, a student may choose an empirical research paper in which a hypothesis is tested using rigorous statistical methods. At the qualitative end of the continuum, a student might examine policy options for a particular public problem and systematically document and defend a policy strategy. Students typically begin work on the thesis at the end of their first year, when they meet as a group with faculty in a thesis workshop that provides guidance in conceptualizing a project and developing a thesis proposal.