The Fall 2015 Newbie cohort at ERG (of which I am a proud member) is 17 strong, 4 of whom are dual Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) students. Based on the cohorts above me, and a rough accounting of dual-degree alumni from years past, this represents a new high water mark for combined GSPP/ERGies since a linkage between the two programs was formalized.
The apparent increasing popularity of the dual degree has led me to reflect a bit on why I made the choice to double up in my graduate education.
In deciding to apply to the dual degree, I found it to be relatively straightforward to tell the story of why ERG and GSPP are complementary programs. In my telling, ERG offered the opportunity to gain depth on the energy and resource issues I care about, while GSPP would provide me with the facility to translate substantive depth into actionable policy recommendations. If you’re guessing that most of the previous sentence was cribbed from one of my application essays (or at least an early version of one), you would be absolutely correct. It’s a neat little story, right?
My misperception [was] that ERG is a place of specialization, while GSPP offers a more general curriculum. In fact, I have come to realize that… quite the opposite is true.
Having spent a year at GSPP and a month as an official ERG student, I’ve started to notice some of the seams in that story. To start, ERG is an academic group, GSPP is a professional school. The difference between those two concepts can best be described with the terminology staff at the school use when referring to students. At GSPP, students are frequently referred to as analysts in training. The implication is that GSPP graduates will be spending our careers working to ensure that public policy is just a bit better informed by evidence-based approaches.
At ERG, the presumption is that many of the students are future academics or, if not, will work in research oriented fields where they expand the boundaries of interdisciplinary energy and resource knowledge. These terminological differences are directly reflected in the courses you take. GSPP courses tend to focus on an ability to leverage others’ work to evaluate impacts of policy alternatives, while courses ERGies take often focus on building foundational graduate-level disciplinary skills that might inform a future dissertation.
The second seam in my story stems from my misperception that ERG is a place of specialization, while GSPP offers a more general curriculum. In fact, I have come to realize that, in certain dimensions of each word, quite the opposite is true. While the subject matter of ERGies’ work tends to fall in a limited number of buckets, students’ approaches vary from environmental science to video game design. Students at GSPP, in contrast, have a wide variety of topical interests, but the school itself emphasizes fairly uniform approaches to policy analysis, mostly focused on economic analysis of allocative efficiency (equity gets mentioned now and then as well).
My coursework at ERG is not just an opportunity to gain technical depth on energy, but to also gain valuable perspective on the non-economic, interdisciplinary approaches to a wide variety of energy and resource issues.
With these seams in mind, does the story of my application essay fall apart? Despite the preceding two paragraphs, I think the answer is no. Instead, my story has just metamorphosed a bit. Where I once saw GSPP as a source of topical variety, I now see its emphasis on economic efficiency as a grounding criteria to keep in the back of my head as I go up the learning curve on the physical aspects of electric power at ERG. I’ve also come to realize that my coursework at ERG is not just an opportunity to gain technical depth on energy, but to also gain valuable perspective on the non-economic, interdisciplinary approaches to a wide variety of energy and resource issues.
What, if anything, does this recontextualization of the dual degree mean? I have to confess that I don’t know. I suspect that it implies some trade-off between breadth and depth, but as I described above that trade-off isn’t necessarily easily split across departments. Perhaps the trade-off will fall more neatly into those courses that prepare me to be an analyst versus those that develop skills better suited to an academic setting.
What will probably happen, though, is that some new narrative will emerge that ties together my graduate coursework, extracurricular, and work experiences. The only thing I know about that story at the moment is that it is in progress.
Learn more about the MPP-ERG concurrent degree here.
Top image source: Steve Day