A forward-thinking curriculum
Our curriculum prepares students with essential skills including development planning and administration, economic and social development, policy analysis, program evaluation, and research methods, as well as a range of diverse course options in six areas of concentration:
- Our legacy NGOs and civil society concentration seeks to make development participatory and empowering, focusing especially on vulnerable and excluded groups, and provides the management and organizational skills needed for careers in nongovernmental social change organizations.
- The cutting-edge human security concentration addresses links between development, human rights, and security issues in order to maximize impact and address neglected topics. It emphasizes influential collaborative approaches to development issues.
- Our innovative energy & environment concentration integrates expertise in development sustainability with the study of global energy industries and alternatives.
- The comparative concentration in governance & international public management explores governance models alongside wide-ranging collaboration and management issues, which are critical to pursuing development in politically, economically, and socially diverse countries worldwide.
- Our social policy and urban affairs & planning concentrations offer comparative and regional expertise on urgent topics for development policies and services, such as health, identity, discrimination, employment, transportation, and urbanization.
Our flexible curriculum design gives students essential and cutting-edge skills which prepare them as future researchers, analysts, and practitioners able to solve diverse development challenges. For example, students can learn to harness the forces of nongovernmental social change and civil society participation; address government and private sector collaboration and management challenges; develop human rights-based policies and programs across UN Sustainable Development Goals; integrate gender and intersectional analysis and tackle inequality; utilize micro and macro economic development tools and confront multifaceted causes of poverty; advance environmental sustainability and urban resilience planning; master policy analysis, program design, project evaluation, and data analytics; and innovate multisectoral responses that center development in wider human security problems that involve human rights violations and humanitarian issues.
Alongside traditional development topics and Sustainable Development Goals, students can therefore study inter-related issues such as human trafficking, gender and ethnic violence, climate change and global warming. We empower MID students to choose their own path, pursuing the issues that drive their passion for advancing the well-being, dignity, and empowerment of people worldwide.
Students also complete a Capstone course or project on a topic of importance to them, and an approved internship locally or abroad. You can access the full concentration descriptions including customized MID plans of study.
Our multidisciplinary course offerings are built on MID faculty expertise and bridge GSPIA’s renowned programs in public administration and international affairs. Students also utilize GSPIA’s path-breaking Centers on social innovation, governance and markets, human security, responsible leadership, and international security studies. Given MID student interests in promoting the well-being of peoples in diverse contexts worldwide, we also are especially well served by the University Center for International Studies which offers access to numerous elective courses on world regions through its National Resource Centers on Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Global Studies.
