Student and Alumni/ae Spotlights

The economics classes at Bard have been great. I especially enjoyed the Economics of Developing Countries with Sanjay DeSilva. It involved conducting research projects on a country of our choice. I chose Malaysia and I’ve been studying east Asian development for the past two years because of that class. For my Senior Project I’m doing a study on southeast Asia. I’ve done so much writing and so many research projects at Bard that, by the time I started senior year, it didn’t seem so foreign to me to do Senior Project.

I’m a big fan of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. BGIA helped me find my internship this past spring semester, which was at a macroeconomic research and forecasting firm in New York City. The internship was a really fantastic experience. I was writing and publishing reports for the website. It was exciting for me to be working there, especially during the European debt crisis. Later I was able to extend my internship through the summer because I received a grant from the Center for Civic Engagement. Over the summer, I coauthored a paper about Indonesian policymaking with my supervisor—a first for me. My Senior Project overlaps with the work I did in the internship. I still go down to the city to meet with them and share research.

My parents always told me how easy it was to start something yourself at Bard, and that was ultimately what brought me here. One of my great experiences at the College has been the varsity swim team. I actually started the team with a few other people. We knew we wanted a team, so we just got together and started swimming. The athletics department gave approval and we became a club sport. But after practicing for a year or so we decided it would be really great to have a varsity team here, so we petitioned the athletics department and got a varsity swim team the next fall. And now it’s existed for two years and we’ve been competing. I can’t believe how easy it was to do something like that here.