The Citizen

By: Shamil Ibragimov   From the fifth to eighth grade I studied in a school around the corner from a beautiful boulevard in my home city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This boulevard was lined with oaks planted about 80 years ago. Every day on my way to school and back, I enjoyed a view of beautiful […]

Prepared by Sasha Ramani, VP of Finance Photo Credit: Fabian Blank from unsplash.com   FULL REPORT: KSSG 16-17 Financial Summary    

By: Shamil Ibragimov Photo Credit: Daniel H. Tong on Unsplash.com   Why are public spaces essential for democracy and open society and why it is so important to preserve it?  Let me start by referring to the work of Robert Putnam. Robert Putnam is a political scientist at Harvard University who for 20 years was […]

By Natalie Kostich, MC/MPA 2017 It all started last October, when Laura Oller (HKS/HBS ’19), Marta Milkowska (HKS/Stanford ’19) and Alex Choi (HKS/Wharton ’19), first met at the info session for the Hult Prize (www.hultprize.org), a start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship that brings together students from around the world to solve the world’s most pressing […]

By: David Duesing Photo credit: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.com   I was up to my knees in crushed plastic bottles in a garage in rural Costa Rica when I realized we’re going about environmentalism all wrong. Controlling our impact on the planet is going to take much more than managing our waste. It’s going to […]

Photo credit: Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash By: May Chengnan Wu Memos, pitches, presentations, and speeches are deliverables we often confront at HKS. They challenge us, come with deadlines, require team efforts, and often need to be presented to an expecting audience. Last summer as a returning MPP student, I had my biggest deliverable which shared […]

With HKS Dean Doug Elmendorf after receiving the Global Universities Challenge Award. Photo Credit: hks.harvard.edu By Andhyta F. Utami, MPP 2018 It is mind-blowing to think that our grandparents used to wait for weeks before they got to hear from a distant relative through a short postcard message. Today, I can video call with my entire […]

By Wei Luo, MPP 2017 On Thursday April 20, 2017, HKS hosted the John F. Kennedy Centennial Symposium to celebrate the 100th anniversary of President Kennedy’s birth and to reaffirm the spirit of public service that he embodied. The Symposium started with opening remarks by HKS dean Doug Elmendorf, who recognized the members of the […]

Harvard Canadians with Andrew Leslie, Canadian Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs (Canada-U.S. Relations) By Sasha Ramani, MPP 2018 In early April, the HKS Canadian Caucus led a trek to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, to explore political affairs north of the border. Thirteen students across HKS, HLS, and SEAS ventured north to reconnect with their […]

Photo Credits: hks.harvard.edu First Place: Charles Skold, MPP 2018 I dreamed of applying to Kennedy And pictured amazing amenities. But the sum of its parts Weren’t quite state of the art— I hope this construction’s the remedy. Honorable Mention: Andrew Levine,  MPP 2017 A professor was teaching in Starr, When a booming sound came from […]

By Faheem Rathore, MPP 2017 Georgia Democratic Congressman and Civil Rights icon John Lewis came to the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on April 14th to receive the 2017 Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award and to speak about the current state of American politics. The award recognizes the contributions of great social activists who have inspired […]

Photo Credit: Presidentialpolls.com By Kelley Greenman, MPP/MBA Harvard, 2017 When Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land, came to speak in the JFK Jr. Forum on March 23, she put into words what I had been feeling since the day after election: Democrats are missing something. Hochschild told us about her experience […]