Second Semester Schedule

Praise the Lord! I’ve got a textbook! One week from midterms and I’m just now getting my first textbook. That should tell you what kind of semester I’m having. Yeah.  As for the”back to regular updates” and whatnot. Sorry I’m not sorry...suffering from a severe case of "why should I care?"

I suppose I should fill you in on the mess that is my schedule, and a description provided by the syllabus, along with how they're going so far.

The Strategy of Development Assistance Projects

In development programs and projects, the particular combination of rationalities may materialize through a combination of factors, such as: a general political and administrative culture of the society; established policy of a donor agency; ideas of individuals involved in planning; and the constellation of actors in idea generation, plan formulation and decision –making.  The main concern of strategy formulation is improvement in the quality of life in developing countries. More specifically, strategies for achieving the development goals include addressing poverty issues and tackling factors following questions: Who decides what resources are given or lent, to which countries and under what conditions? What types of aid are effective? What are the post-emergency priorities in countries suffering from the effects of man-made or natural disasters and how can international development assistance work best in such conditions? The course will examine the specific development issues in the context of development programs. It is designed for nurturing international development consultants in the future.

In Reality: Charts, hypotheses and theories, theories hypotheses and charts. I’ve been in the class since September and am no closer to being able to answering ANY of the questions posed in the syllabus. This is more like an exercise in how to weed through page after page of repetitive BS for the three sentence explanation you actually need.

Public Private Partnership & Corporate Social Responsibility

This course covers the most salient issue in today’s development cooperation: mobilizing financial, technical, and managerial resources of the private sector in development especially with regards to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), perceived as alternatives or supplementary to the traditional modalities of development cooperation relying on traditional public resources such as foreign aid.

In Reality: How to become a slave to the Harvard Business Review. Other than that: meh, acceptable.

Project Cycle Management

This course is designed to provide the IDC students with practical knowledge of project cycle management (PCM) methods, skills and tools in the public sector that manage ODA development projects through project programming, identification, design, appraisal, implementation and evaluation, using the Project Design & Monitoring Framework (DMF) and participatory approaches. By the end of this lecture the students should understand and be able to utilize various tools of project cycle management

In Reality: I’ve killed several forests for lengthy handouts I’ll never read again (or in their entirety). Abbreviations and acronyms need to die. Other than that, it’s coming along quite well and I’m actually learning isht I can use.

Business Consulting Skills

The class of Business Consulting Skills (BCS) is designed for undergraduate students who want to develop and enhance core competencies necessary to become competitive consultants or effective managers. Instead of dealing with specific themes of business consulting, this course will deal with general topics relating to various industries of global business.

In Reality: There’s not much to it so far, as we’ve missed a few Fridays (and the class is only on Friday), but what we have done is actually useful in a concrete way and immediately applicable.