Master of Public Policy Student Association
906 8th Ave SW T2P 1H9 Calgary, AB, Canada

The love for this place Is-rael. 2018-2019 MPP students having an awesome time studying abroad!

MPP students or the newest line up in the NHL All-Star games? You decide. #CalgaryFlames #MPP

Meet our Student Spotlight: Nicholas Godwin! When not balancing work, school, and everyday life, Nick can be found supporting the San Francisco Giants. How did your current work influence your decision to pursue the MPP? My undergraduate degree was in environmental science and I’ve been working as an environmental adviser now for a few years. ... I know and I understand the science behind climate change and what happens when you burn fossil fuels, but I’m also a realist. There is no immediate switch or solution to the current state of how the world workspeople burn this stuff for energy. It’s not a bad thing because so many people are in poverty, and how do you lift these people out of poverty long-term? You first must make basic lighting available to them. It increases productivity so people can earn more and increase their level of education slowly, economies develop. It’s not bad that we use this as a fuel source, but it is not sustainable in the long run. Working in the energy industry, I’ve had a front-row seat to the politics involved in the ‘how do we develop Canadian natural resources and energy resources sustainably?’ discussion. Many people are opposed to energy, but in a province like Alberta, every road, hospital, school, highway, etc. is funded by this and people don’t often think of the situation like that. How have you managed the work-school-life balance? The balance has been a lot of work because I do work full-time which is technically 40 hours a week, but oftentimes more than that. I’ve had to get serious about time management. I schedule myself down to the hour and half-hour, which seems intense, and it is, but it works. The lead up to final exams last semester was insane, I won’t lie. But my work has been super supportive. They’re flexible, which is nice, as it’s given me some leeway to work on school when I have to and focus back on work when I have to. It’s a challenge, but it’s doable. It’s something that I want to do, so I am making it happen.

Why did you choose the MPP? Back in the Gambia, I worked for the World Food Programme and a lot of the work that we did was shifting away from providing aid assistance to something more sustainable: building capacity, knowledge transfer, etc. It shifted my work from communications in the traditional way to more policy-based engagement with the government. During that process, I realized that the country, more than anything else, needed evidence-based policy formulationpolic...ies that would derive from the actual needs of the people. We had weak capacity in that regard. I thought rather than have a master’s degree in international development, as I always wanted, I need to focus more on what my country needs and put myself in a better place to contribute. So, I decided it would be interesting to understand how policies are formulated and the knowledge that goes behind it and what type of skills I would need to help my country make better policies that are more responsive to needs. Why the University of Calgary? A friend of mine told me there was a scholarship for a program focused on public policy in Canada. I said, Oh, Canadathat’s far away! Eventually, I said, Okay, I will just give it a try. As I progressed through the first stage of the scholarship process, I got excited. Through the Scholarship Program they had a lot of schools listed as recommendedthe University of Calgary’s MPP being one of them. Because I am a family-woman, I decided a one-year’s master’s degree is a necessity. I started talking to people from the scholarship board and from the school, looking at the views and the type of people who graduate from the program. I needed a program that is broad enough to maximize my gains and give me a completely different perspective of thingsso here I am! What are your research interests? My interests are motivated by poverty. I have been thinking a lot about the recent context of the Gambia and migration issues. We are one of the largest countries in Africa where we have young people moving out to find a better life. I have been thinking, is it because they are poor, or could there be other reasons? I am thinking about exploring the relationship between migration and poverty and being in Canada would enrich my understanding because Canada is on the receiving end.

Some MPP students celebrating the end of the semester by building their coalitions at the @thecalgaryzoo #PoliticsAndCollectiveChoice #MPP