I came to a policy school with an aim to build hard skills that could supplement my field understanding of development issues. Thus, I was conscious of aligning my coursework to strengthen my learnings about the developing world.
I thus took the advanced Quantitative Methods class series at the Harvard Kennedy School. It gave me rigorous training in empirical analysis and familiarised me with R and Stata. This prepared me for my interviews at the World Bank. Another class that complimented this series was my module on Data and Information Visualization. The introduction to Tableau in this class was also helpful to visualise data and present it to the clients during my internship. I strongly believe that this class equipped me with skills of storytelling with data that I will use even post my internship.
HKS’s Policy Design and Delivery class when taken with the Problem-Driven Iterative Approach (PDIA) in Action class build a solid foundation needed to implement large-scale programs. I build muscle to narrow down the criteria, analyse policy options, and build an agile implementation plan that will change behaviors. This came in handy when I was working on the cost-benefit analysis of each policy option that the World Bank wanted to recommend for the government of Liberia.
Lastly, I would like to mention another class that helped me design the policy in Liberia: Science of Behavior Change. This is a great introductory class that not only covers all the literature on behavior change through nudges and other methods but also gives you the chance to apply these principles to a policy problem.