This happened last week!
That's John Podesta on the left, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, and Chair and Counselor of the Center for American Progress (liberal think tank here in DC, what what!). More recently he served as the US representative to the UN High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. (AKA development nerd alert!) Next is Steve Radelet, a super smart dude, who currently serves as my Econ professor (and husband to Carrie)! Gillette Hall has Oregon roots, so she's cool, (even if they're in EUGENE), and Ann Van Dusen teaches me all about Strategy, Design & Implementation, besides being the director of my program and an overall badass high-powered lady. An extremely insightful panel. Where are we going after 2015? How will we build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals, while at the same time making the next round of 'sustainable' development goals even better? How we frame and address the big issues of the next 50 years (limited resources, income divergence, pollution, 'solving' all the world's 'problems') is the stuff of my future career. This is what I'll be puzzling out over the next 50 years. Yaay! These are BIG issues, deftly discussed by these heavy hitters, three of whom are or will be my professors. How lucky am I to be here in DC, and at Georgetown? VERY! (Even if it's currently shutdown).
How interesting to be talking about the political development of poor countries when our own country is going through a crisis of political settlements (look at me throwing around vocab words from class like I know what I'm talking about)!
What's grosser than a class-full of sadomasochistic development grad students? That they had a stats midterm today! What's grosser than that? They had to make presentations about how they would advise Ruritania, a made-up country, to politically and economically shape itself up after a long history of turmoil and strife! What's grosser than that? They have strategy papers due tomorrow (or 'soon', for those groups who have mad negotiation skills). What's grosser than that? They're surviving! (For now...barely...stay tuned...)
