Signing off
I wanted to cap off my blog posts with a zoom image, since this part of my life does not seem to be going away anytime soon. To say that I’m disappointed to have a probable case of COVID-19 during the last week of my master’s degree is a bit of an understatement, especially after having dodged it completely so far. However, I’m pretty lucky (it’s mild, and I have an ample supply of cough drops and bath bombs to get me through).
This class’s field trip, in-person component, was honestly a highlight of my master’s degree at UofT (making missing tomorrow all the more of a disappointment). During my undergrad at UofT, my most valuable lessons I learned were outside of the classroom, not in, and having a class about making an impact from the outside that primarily took place outside was indelible.
Although I may sound like a hypocrite writing this as someone beginning a career in government, I think buttressing the MPP program’s government-centric curriculum with a course like this is extremely useful. Many of the classes I took focused on “high level” policy implementation, devising these “theories of everything” which although certainly nice do need to get balanced out a bit. And although I had to reprogram my brain slightly to analyze policy issues at an agonizingly micro-level, the intellectual exercise will do me good in the long-term, I think.
Talking to Councillor Mike Layton the previous week about the complex strategies that go into something as seemingly simple as bike lanes on a stretch of road in Toronto exemplified that to me. I grew up in a town where you could bike for thirty minutes and only see two cars, the idea of placing this much significance and energy into bike lanes initially baffled me, but now I know…
Meaningful change can obviously happen from within government, but policy graduate students need to know that there are equally valid methods of change (deputations, stakeholder negotiations, strongly worded Yelp reviews, etc.) available in their toolkit.
Talking to my assigned “changemaker” last week (John Williams) was extremely helpful as someone who used to work in student government and activism. There’s a common sentiment amongst student activists that once you understand how everything works, it’s time for you to graduate and move on. Many of the projects I worked on in undergrad would have run so much differently had I known what I did now, but as always hindsight is 20/20. So chatting with someone trying to make a change in higher ed long into their adulthood was extremely gratifying.
For fear of rambling too much, gonna end here. This class was extremely helpful, it was a pleasure studying and learning alongside all of you, and I hope to stay in contact and see all the cool things you do in the future.
— Padraic
