Through MIDP’s Summer Experience and gui2de summer internships, McCourt students spent their summers applying analytical methods at leading international development institutions.
The McCourt School of Public Policy’s Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) program includes a professional experience during the summer after the first year. The professional placement provides an opportunity to apply new analytical skills and gain hands-on experience with top international development organizations, learning directly from policy researchers and experts. By covering travel costs and providing a living stipend, the McCourt School empowers students to design summer placements that align with their specific interests.
Through gui2de, a university-wide international research platform jointly convened by the McCourt School and the Economics Department, students have the opportunity to support international development projects globally through funded internships in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.
MIDP Summer Experience
Lynzee Lee (MIDP ’27)
This summer, Lynzee Lee worked with IDinsight in Lusaka, Zambia. Her day-to-day work involved quantitative, qualitative, and administrative tasks for a randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of a refugee livelihood program in Uganda and Ethiopia, known as the DREAMS project. In addition to this project, she also conducted fieldwork on a separate project in northern Zambia, where she observed malaria and anemia testing in schools and spent time with the field team.
Zheng Gu (MIDP’27)
In China’s Sichuan province, Zheng Gu worked with Professor Scott Rozelle, faculty co-director of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) within Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. Zheng’s work focused on a research project examining the fertility rate in Sichuan.
The project’s fieldwork connected him with a wide range of program participants, including families in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, as well as struggling immigrant families in the suburbs, all of whom faced financial strains and difficult tradeoffs around their children’s wellbeing. Gu was most surprised by how some of the most under-resourced, most remote villages manage to meet their children’s needs through strong community support systems. This observation made him reconsider which communities would benefit most from different forms of public services. In addition to fieldwork, Gu assisted in coding and translating the interviews he conducted with local families.
Eedo Mei (MIDP ’27)
Eedo Mei spent her summer in Dhaka, Bangladesh, working with the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE) and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), an experience she described as “one of the best summers she’s had.” Her work included collaborating with field implementers to support survey activities, monitoring field operations, observing and supporting enumerator training and identifying potential data quality issues to discuss with the research team.
Overall, Mei described the experience as an incredible opportunity to connect rigorous research design with on-the-ground implementation. It further strengthened her interest in evidence-based development policy and gave her a much deeper appreciation for the operational challenges behind high-quality field research.
gui2de Summer Internships
Gavin Ali Gondalwala (MIDP ’27)
Gavin Gondalwala spent his summer working with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Kigali, Rwanda, working on the Supporting Teacher Achievement in Rwandan Schools (STARS Program), a nationwide scale-up implemented by IPA and gui2de in partnership with the Ministry of Education. Gavin designed a time-use survey for headteachers to evaluate how the initiative has shifted time allocation in treatment groups compared to a control pool. He spent a majority of his time on the project researching legal responsibilities, while also talking with education professionals and data-collection experts at IPA to get a sense of the “right” questions to ask.
Gondalwala also noted that the project has been an exciting exercise in the challenges of collecting accurate data without introducing cognitive bias.
Amy Azania (MIDP ’27)
Amy Azania spent her summer in Kigali, Rwanda, working on the STARS program. After four years of piloting different teacher and headteacher pay-for-performance models, the program is being scaled nationwide. The intervention aims to improve learning outcomes for students across the country. Her days were a mix of survey design, data crunching and drafting communication materials to share Rwanda’s progress. She described it as a privilege to help support work that is deliberate about solving a challenging but critical aspect of human development.
Adrianne Sugden (MIDP ’27)
Working with gui2de in their research field office located in Nairobi, Kenya, Adrianne Sugden described her summer in the country as the highlight of her research career so far. She has gained hands-on experience with randomized controlled trial research, taking on the redesign and management of high-frequency checks for gui2de’s Give Directly Project engine. The project, a partnership between several organizations, is aimed at measuring the impact of large cash transfers combined with a formal bank account and financial literacy training on urban refugees in Nairobi. Sugden also gained experience with programming tools like R and Stata, marking her first time using the statistical analysis tools in a professional setting.
Beyond work, Sugden enjoyed weekend trips with fellow Georgetown interns in Nairobi, including a visit to the Maasai Mara, and shared photos from both her travels and her work.
Urvashi Suraj (MIDP ’27)
Urvashi Suraj worked in collaboration with African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) and gui2de on a health policy project in Kenya. Suraj accompanied enumerators on groundtruthing visits to 15 health facilities across Nairobi and helped with desk reviews to understand how Kenya’s new health insurance program is operating on the ground. Separately, she also joined researcher Julie Zollman, director of Ekko Insights, on field visits across five counties in Kenya to listen to mothers from different backgrounds share their birth experiences. Suraj has found it fascinating to see how differently national policies play out across the country.
Suraj was excited to see concepts like moral hazard and adverse selection from her Public Finance coursework show up in real life. Above all, she hopes to carry these conversations with her and think about people’s experiences when continuing to work on this project from 7,000 miles away.
Xin Xia (MPP ’27)
Xin Xia spent her summer internship in Tanzania working on the Tanzania Institute of Education’s e-learning management system (eLMS) platform.In partnership with TIE (Tanzania Institute of Education) and the Tanzanian government, gui2de is working to advance the quality of teacher education in Tanzania. Using methods including randomized controlled trials, data collection, literature review and fieldwork, the project provides pedagogical capacity-building training for local teachers. gui2de also collaborating with local government agencies to help improve their student information management system (SIS).
A conference in Arusha, a city in Tanzania, exposed Xia to the infrastructure gaps limiting digital education tools nationwide. Field visits in the Mtwara region, including meetings with District Education Office staff, revealed that many schools lack internet access or devices, and some teachers had never even heard of eLMS. She came away seeing education technology reform as a long-term, multi-dimensional challenge that requires firsthand fieldwork to truly understand.
