SPURS Fellowships provide trip to mirror, study, and join

Sixteen worldwide mid-career city planners and public directors not too long ago bid farewell to the MIT campus, having accomplished a 10-month exploration of North American schooling and tradition designed to increase their skilled networks and infuse their work with new insights as they return to influential positions in authorities businesses, personal companies, and different organizations all through the creating world.

Hailing from Argentina, Bhutan, China, Egypt, Honduras, India, Kosovo, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Trinidad & Tobago, Yemen, and Zimbabwe, they comprise this yr’s group of MIT Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) Fellows. Founded within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1967, SPURS has drawn from 135 nations to host greater than 750 mid-career people who’re or can be shaping coverage of their house nations. Along with admitting a number of fellows instantly into SPURS, MIT has competed efficiently to be amongst 13 U.S. universities that additionally host a bigger group of fellows yearly chosen and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program.

Recipients of the Humphrey Fellowship have their journey to the United States, residing bills, and different prices absolutely financed by the U.S. State Department. Perhaps equally priceless — and a few say distinctive amongst worldwide fellowships — is a spotlight that frees all fellows to discover past classroom teachings to study, and advance their skilled growth with out the strain of incomes a level.

“This is the perfect reward of my life, this yr at MIT and Cambridge basically,” says Carina Arvizu-Machado of Mexico, former cities director for Mexico and Colombia on the World Resources Institute and Mexico’s former nationwide deputy secretary of city growth and housing, who’s sponsored by the Humphrey Fellowship. “I believe this yr of stepping again and stepping out of the lively life that we’ve as professionals and with the ability to mirror, to study, to trade concepts — it’s very helpful.”

Arvizu-Machado’s sentiments are echoed by many previous and current fellows, says Bish Sanyal, MIT’s Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and director of SPURS since 2004.

“The fellows point out that this one yr has given them an actual alternative to mirror on what they’ve achieved up to now and what they’re going to do sooner or later,” he says, including that the worth of creating skilled networks with friends in different creating nations can’t be overstated. “Some have by no means met colleagues from one other nation earlier than. The program supplies the perfect setting to mirror on skilled challenges, collectively, with out political issues which stifle frank deliberation of their house nations.”

While some SPURS Fellows won’t be well-traveled earlier than coming to MIT, they’re nonetheless a uniformly “very extremely motivated and politically highly effective group,” Sanyal says — movers and shakers of their house nations in fields equivalent to city planning, economics, governance, and enterprise growth. Some notable alumni embrace the present managing director of the International Monetary Fund, a former CEO of the World Bank, former ambassadors to the United States from Colombia and Haiti, the company vp of strategic programming of Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina or CAF (Latin America’s largest growth financial institution), and a Nepalese Supreme Court justice.

“When the Ebola outbreak occurred in Africa, the one that headed the Ebola response staff in Liberia was a SPURS Fellow,” Sanyal says.

The advantages of getting a such an achieved and cosmopolitan group of individuals on campus movement each methods, says Allan Goodman, CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the Humphrey Fellowship for the state division.

“It actually enriches MIT … and all of the locations which can be collaborating,” Goodman says. “The undergraduate and graduate college students work together with the fellows, they usually wouldn’t ordinarily have that likelihood. You have a ready-made group of worldwide consultants who’re targeted on the theme of your division.”

Each college collaborating within the Humphrey Fellowship program is assigned fellows based mostly on a particular space of experience. With SPURS housed throughout the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the programmatic focus is on city and regional planning. Sanyal remarks that this focus is deliberate and constant no matter whether or not fellows are sponsored by the U.S. Department of State or different businesses from the fellows’ house nations. One distinction, nevertheless, is that Humphrey Fellows are required to be professionally affiliated for at the very least six weeks with U.S.-based organizations of their areas of labor or curiosity — an engagement described as a cross between an internship and pro-bono consultancy that gives fellows the chance to develop skilled relationships with U.S. practitioners.

Peter Moran, director of the Humphrey program at IIE, says the most important worth to fellows at MIT and different collaborating universities is the flexibility to step out of their previous skilled lives and mirror from a contemporary perspective on their skilled aspirations to serve their nations in an interconnected world. In the method, in addition they profit from the relationships with different fellows {and professional} partnerships that final years after they return house.

“To say it broadens your perspective actually undersells it,” he says. “The range of the fellows is exceptional. It’s lots of the world … and we’re placing them throughout the desk collectively.”

By persevering with to place fellows from various corners of the world collectively for over 50 years, SPURS has sparked lasting partnerships between fellows, in addition to amongst SPURS alumni, MIT college and college students, and different professionals they encounter throughout their time in Cambridge.

Two components are key to sustaining the top quality of this system, Sanyal says.

First, further funding may strengthen this system, and, to that finish, he envisions sponsoring financially sustainable relationships with over a dozen native, nationwide, and worldwide businesses as long-term companions.

The second problem is to revise this system’s goal in a quickly altering world. This is tougher to surmount. When SPURS was established in 1967, Sanyal says, there was broadly held public notion that the United States must look outward to assist democratic nations of the world.

“I believe the problem now could be that many nations, together with the U.S., are wanting inward,” Sanyal says, including that this inward flip will increase the significance that SPURS develops a various portfolio of funding sources.

As Arvizu-Machado ready to return to Mexico this spring, she recounted myriad optimistic experiences enabled by her fellowship — from lectures she was invited to provide and graduate programs she attended to training yoga along with her undergraduate dorm mates.

“Most essential, I believe, is the folks I’ve met,” she says. “This consists of, foremost, the opposite fellows. They are simply superb folks. They have change into a part of my household. But additionally, among the college and the prolonged community which this fellowship lets you have entry to. I’m very grateful to be a part of this program.”

One of Arvizu-Machado’s co-fellows, Tenzin Jamtsho, agrees that the chance for private connections with different fellows in addition to with college extremely revered of their fields is the side of SPURS that may proceed to resonate when he returns to his native Bhutan. Jamtsho, director of administration and finance at Bhutan’s Druk Gyalpo’s Institute (previously the Royal Academy), who’s sponsored by the Humphrey Fellowship, says he pursued the fellowship after colleagues at house informed him it could be “life altering.” His precise expertise at MIT affirmed this expectation.