This winter break, I spent two and a half weeks in India as part of the Rockefeller Center’s inaugural global policy practicum. After studying India in Hanover for the term, my class embarked on a whirlwind tour to meet with policymakers, business leaders and entrepreneurs to collect recommendations for our white paper on Indian economic reform. As we touched down in Mumbai, I was fully expecting to be overwhelmed — India is indeed a collage of sights and smells that I’m not sure I’ll ever encounter again. But what I didn’t anticipate was how daunting our project was and how intellectually challenged I would be. Nor did I guess that I would learn so much simply by doing.
To provide a bit more background, the course was designed as an exercise in designing public policy. Our assignment was to come up with a task force report that would offer substantive, politically feasible suggestions on all relevant dimensions of economic policy. The trip itself was structured around a series of meetings — we would typically be given an hour of time with a top Indian financier, key government official, small business owner or social entrepreneur to hear their perspectives and then ask questions. Through the good graces of economics professor Charles Wheelan and Dartmouth alumni’s connections, we were able to speak with the deputy head of India’s economic planning commission, The Economist’s top India reporter and the World Bank’s India experts. In most cases, those who held the answers to our questions were sitting right in front of us.
If only it had been that easy. Your Dartmouth education might teach you to appreciate Locke and Thoreau, or build model bridges that can withstand thousands of pounds of force. But you might not as readily learn how to craft pointed, detailed questions or be an intelligent listener. We realized in the middle of our first meeting that we weren’t very good at either of these things. Granted, we were trying to get a panel of five academics to tell us what reforms to prioritize, and Wheelan later reminded us that you’ll never get five academics to agree on anything. Yet even toward the end of our first week, I was struck by how we struggled as a group to steer these conversations in our intended direction.
Eventually, day after day of intense meetings taught us how to move beyond generalities and identify our interviewees’ subtle turns of phrase that would make our memo read as though we’d actually been to India. We also learned how to phrase questions effectively; rather than asking whether India needed a dictatorship to solve its problems, or if the country simply had too many people (I’m guilty of posing one of those questions), we drilled down on specifics. Does India need a value-added tax? If so, what should the rate be? How can India change its labor laws without inciting worker riots? What would the proper social safety net look like? We learned how to learn — figuring out how to extract the information we needed from real, live sources for synthesis rather than having it spoon-fed to us from textbooks.
Dartmouth needs more programs like the global practicum. My time in India convinced me of the value in experiential learning, and I wholeheartedly support President Phil Hanlon’s push to make it a bigger part of the curriculum. But nothing too revolutionary is needed for this to happen. The College is already positioned to take the next step — we have incredibly talented faculty who would love to engage more fully with students and a long winter break that is begging to be put to better use. The administration can help out by clearing needless bureaucratic hurdles that make it difficult to approve new classes and making funds available to defray student costs (the Rockefeller Center subsidized trip costs for students on financial aid). Every department should be encouraged to start its own programs and make them unique. Mini-foreign study programs and language study abroads or fieldwork are just some of the possibilities. Allowing departments freer rein to realize a diverse range of visions strikes me as the easiest and most innovative way that Dartmouth can use hands-on experiences to remain on the cutting edge of undergraduate education.
