Preparing for SAIS oral exams
January 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The oral exam is a very small part of the overall SAIS experience – one hour out of two years of study – but I have to say that mine stands out in my mind as one of the most frustrating hours I spent there. The exam proceeded differently than I’d expected, based on my adviser’s recommendations for preparation, and I left feeling like I hadn’t had the opportunity to discuss the topics that truly interested me – and had been caught flat-footed by a variety of questions on topics more tangential to my studies. Here’s how it went.
How I was told to prepare:
- Write a one-page paper on a topic “that will integrate knowledge from the student’s regional or functional program and international economics.” (I wrote on the connections between structural adjustment, democratization, and civil war in Rwanda and Burundi.) The examiners will read the paper, and may discuss it in detail, or pass over it entirely if they’re not sufficiently familiar with the topic to pose questions on it.
- Read up on international affairs for approximately the week before the exam. Examiners will often discuss current events, and ask students to provide political or economic analysis.
- Review materials from all of your courses, but spend 70% of your time on the core economics courses.
- All of the above suggestions came from my adviser. A TA (and former SAIS student) also told me not to worry about understanding the detailed theoretical underpinnings of the core econ courses, but to focus on their policy applications.
- I had taken courses or worked for both of my examiners previously, and was aware of their research interests. As I studied, I tried to anticipate the questions that they might ask.
How it actually went:
- We didn’t discuss the contents of my one-pager or any current events. So much for the idea that “[the one-pager] along with a brief introduction by the student…will serve as the basis of discussion for the first 15 to 20 minutes.”
- I reviewed the material from the core economics courses with an eye to their policy implications, as my TA had suggested. I definitely wasn’t prepared for a 15-minute discussion of the theoretical preconditions for something to be considered a market failure. (Examples of market failures in practice, such as the implications of failure of contract enforcement and property rights for land markets and agricultural output, weren’t considered sufficient.)
- My economics examiner was a trade economist, so I had reviewed the basic trade theories in depth, but I was still a bit surprised to have to discuss the assumptions underlying the Ricardian, specific factors, and Heckscher-Ohlin models.
- I felt much better prepared for the questions from my IDEV examiner. They ranged from the general (“What’s the connection between democracy and economic growth?”) to the specific (“You mentioned that you wrote a paper on conditional cash transfer programs. Do they reduce poverty?”), and touched on technical issues as well (“What’s the difference between an RCT, a quasi-experiment, and a natural experiment?”).
- Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the exam was the fact that we didn’t discuss my independent study at all. I really enjoyed writing it, and had been looking forward to running its propositions past my examiners.
In sum:
I felt like most of the advice that I was given about preparation was accurate. However, there were several things that would have reduced my stress level considerably during the exam had I known them.
- All of the heavily theoretical questions were drawn from the core economics courses, not from electives. Be conversant with econ theory as well as policy applications.
- Be prepared to defend your course of study. For example, I took a course on African militaries, whose salience to development seems obvious to me, and was asked why this was a relevant choice.
- Prepare a list of two or three main policy takeaways from each of your electives, as well as a few case studies that could be used to support these points.
- If you’re currently taking another course with a professor, they probably won’t ask you about the content of that course, since they’ll already be familiar with your level of knowledge on the subject.
Getting the most from SAIS academics
January 6th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I graduated a semester early from SAIS almost by accident. There’s no indication in the school’s policies & procedures to indicate that this is possible, and technically speaking, if I had followed all of my department’s regulations to the letter, it probably wouldn’t have been possible. What I found during the course of my final semester, however, was many professors and administrators are willing to be flexible about requirements if one provides a good rationale for doing things differently. If you have a clear vision of what you’d like to study, this can definitely help you get the most from your SAIS experience.
Here are some of the useful tricks I learned:
- Early graduation is quite feasible! It’s simply a matter of fitting 16 non-language courses into three semesters. I did this by taking five courses each semester, and one course during the summer. Six courses per term is the upper limit, so it would even be possible to pull this off whilst still spending the summer outside of DC. (I did five academic courses and a language during my third semester, and whilst this was time-consuming, it’s no worse than taking four courses and working a 20-hour internship, as many SAIS students do.) Savings: $18,000 worth of tuition.
- You can get IDEV credit for courses that aren’t on the list of approved courses if you can show the departmental administrators that the course is relevant to development. Especially useful if you’re in the badly understaffed politics & governance track. I did this for both of my regional and one of the P&G requirements.
- If you’re strongly interested in a topic that isn’t covered by existing courses, or would like to come away with something approaching an MA thesis, an independent study is a great idea. The Red Book provides the relevant details. It’s best to approach professors the semester before you’d like to do your study, as independent studies must be supervised by a faculty member, and SAIS’ small faculty can make it difficult to find a professor willing to take you on. (That said, an adjunct can be your direct supervisor as long as a full-time faculty member has also signed on to supervise.) I ended up working fairly autonomously under Stephen Smith, who’s an amazing resource for all things related to conflict in Africa.
I have mixed feelings on the utility of testing out of the poli sci and economics core courses. I didn’t test out of them largely because I didn’t trust myself to read an entire trade/stats/monetary textbook before the exam, and I definitely learned the material in greater depth from taking the courses. On the other hand, I found most of the econ pedagogy rather antiquated – a useful foundation if you plan to continue doing theoretical work in economics, but otherwise of limited practical application. I enjoyed comparative national systems, but definitely wished I had tested out of theories of IR, which I found deadly dull. (CNS is more obviously applicable to my primary interest, politics in Africa, whereas theories of IR is oriented towards classic interstate conflicts, which occur less often in Africa.) So, in sum: testing out isn’t necessary for early graduation, but could be useful if you understand your academic preferences clearly going in and wish to substitute more interesting classes for something you know you won’t enjoy or need in your future career.
(On a different note, I initially googled the school’s logo before deciding to use my own photo above, and got a page full of, well, sais…)
Graduate school & the development industry
January 3rd, 2012 § 10 Comments
(Update, 8 January: Hi MR readers! Thanks for stopping by; I’d welcome your thoughts. I should add that this post isn’t meant exclusively as a critique of SAIS, but as a representative experience of many of the schools that offer MAs in development.)
Greetings from the other side of A) the new year and B) grad school! With the help of several supportive professors and a hell of a lot of late nights in the library, I pulled off a six-course load this term and graduated a semester early. Now that I’m done thinking intensely about development for classes, I’m looking forward to returning to doing the same on this blog.
In my not-so-copious free time over the last month, I’ve thought a fair amount about this blog post and its trenchant criticism of the MA in international development at SIPA, much of which I share. Of course, there were plenty of things I enjoyed about my time at SAIS, chief among which were my classmates, the many insightful lectures I attended both on- and off-campus, and writing my independent study on post-conflict reconciliation in Burundi. It’s a truism to say that many of the best aspects of any academic experience happen outside of the classroom, of course, but with further thought I find it troubling that the majority of my classes, which took up by far the greatest part of my time there, were not among the things which I found valuable.
A bit of background here. I studied international development in undergrad as well, at Dartmouth’s geography department, which (among the human geographers) largely espouses a critical geography approach. I didn’t come away from this with anything like a canonical understanding of what development was or how it worked, but I did come away firmly convinced that context and history matter deeply, that my own understanding of the world is incredibly partial, that power relations are inescapable, that humility and a willingness to continually learn from as many sources as possible are the primary tools that ought to be wielded by the Westerner fortunate enough to participate in this whole development enterprise. (This is where the view on my Positionality page comes from.) The two years I spent in Africa after undergrad only convinced me of the depth of my own ignorance on matters development-related, and of the fallacy of assuming that poverty somehow stripped people of agency, or neutralized questions of internal politics.
That said, my geography courses did tend to pass over the types of structural questions addressed by political science and economics, and when I was applying for graduate school, I chose SAIS in hopes of remedying this deficiency in my education. There were some ways in which this certainly succeeded. I appreciated my courses in microeconomics and monetary theory, and was definitely intrigued by the insights of my polisci courses on democratization, corruption, and African politics. (They never went quite as much into questions of conflict and state-building as I hoped they would, though.) My introduction to development course also provided a useful overview of growth theory, and contemporary views on “bringing the state back in” to the development process. There were absolutely elements of SAIS academics that I am grateful for.
This doesn’t obviate my concern that many other aspects of one’s SAIS education prepare one for working in the development industry, rather than trying to understand the political and historical contexts in which one’s actions occur and work in humility and partnership towards a development-oriented end. We’re taught about the evolution of Western thought on development; we’re never taught about what life was like for ordinary people in the days of import-substitution industrialization, or during the reign of the Washington Consensus. We’re taught about the myriad policy failings of African governments, and the proliferation of NGOs in response; we’re never told to consider taking African politics seriously. For some reason, discussion of conflict is completely relegated to the Conflict Studies department, even though civil war has been the biggest menace to development in many African states. National and sub-national histories are entirely absent, as is any nod to the importance of local languages. Sometimes the whole experience felt like the world that we were studying in development classes had been colonized by homo economicus, who’s largely rational and comprehensible, though occasionally driven to irrationality by some moral failing like greed or stupidity. He has no pride or fear or compassion; he engages in neither petty quarrels nor heroic self-sacrifice; he has no social context or history. He is the ideal target for manipulation by the development industry. And, of course, he isn’t a real person.
In many ways, I think that SAIS is doing the best it can. Students have access to a broad range of development-related subjects; they’re required to learn a foreign language; our professors are often more thoughtful and compassionate than the material they teach might indicate. But I worry that SAIS leaves us just educated enough to be dangerous – to be hired by the World Bank and the INGOs to make decisions on behalf of the poor in accordance with contemporary development theory, without any requirement to understand an area’s political and historical context first, and without any sense that the poor have agency of their own, and with insufficient thought to the power dynamics of the relationships between aid agencies, national/sub-national governments, and ordinary people. I worry that the real assistance that the development industry does provide will be accompanied by other harms, born of ignorance and power, to those people who can least afford it. (The Dodd-Frank law on conflict minerals is a salient example of this; see this post for evidence.) And I don’t know how to begin changing this system.
Africa Association Happy Hour
March 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
If you’re in DC this Friday, stop by SAIS after work and support the Africa Association! $3 drinks, music from across the continent and as much Tusker as we can get our hands on.
UPDATE: The SAIS student government just informed us that we can only serve alcohol from 5.30 – 8 pm (long story), so come by early!
