Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs offers interdisciplinary academic programs that inspire and prepare Yale students for global leadership and service. The school is home to Yale’s Master in Public Policy (M.P.P.) in Global Affairs,  Master of Advanced Study (M.A.S.) in Global Affairs, and the undergraduate major in global affairs.   

We bring to Yale the most talented, passionate students from all over the globe, dedicated to making the world a better place. We prepare students to understand world events through academically rigorous programs taught by outstanding faculty who are leaders in their fields and by prominent practitioners of global affairs.   

Our M.P.P. occupies a unique place among international affairs graduate programs. The four-course interdisciplinary core curriculum provides students with a shared intellectual foundation focused on acquisition of the ideas, ways of thinking, and skills needed for leadership in global affairs.  

How are the lessons of history linked to current events in your program?  

One of the flagship initiatives of Yale’s new Jackson School of Global Affairs is International Security Studies (ISS), a center that concentrates on studying current security challenges in light of the past.  ISS hosts young scholars, mostly historians, as post-doctoral fellows, and runs seminars and conferences that link the present to the past. It also runs the Grand Strategy program, a year-long class that studies historical change and contemporary security problems. 

What threats lie ahead for those countries that see themselves in the crosshairs of competition? 

As we enter an era of Great Power competition, we can assume that international instability will be much more significant than at any time since the Cold War ended. We are already seeing how rapid economic and technological change influence current security challenges. We will have more territorial conflict of the kind we now witness in Ukraine. And we will struggle with the difficulties of handling fundamental problems such as climate change and pandemics. The Jackson School sees understanding these new and sweeping changes as indispensable for future policymakers. 

What skills are needed to help students prepare to manage crises and global risk over time?  

Students need to study the different regions of the world in terms of their own contradictions and problems and not just as outgrowths of U.S. foreign policy. They need a more extensive knowledge of history and languages, not just to navigate current challenges but to obtain a more fundamental understanding of aims and ideas that differ from our own. 

What leadership traits are needed to navigate uncertainty?  

Given the difficulties in international affairs over the past generation, two of the qualities that are most called for are restraint and flexibility. The former demands training in setting priorities in a context of finite resources. The latter encourages us to grapple with uncertainty through an ability to adjust policies in order to achieve desired results on a larger scale. At the Jackson School, we instill the ability to differentiate and apply these approaches, though a unique program that combines scholarship and theory taught by distinguished faculty with practical training and professionals who have worked in the field. 

What are the major changes Jackson will make when it becomes a professional school? 

We will be investing in people who want to make a difference by solving the most challenging problems in global affairs. This means significantly expanding our faculty whose research informs critical public policy challenges in international security, development, trade, climate, global health, human rights, and other areas. Central to this investment is changing our two-year professional degree to a master in public policy (M.P.P.) and reimagining our curriculum to better prepare future global affairs professionals for impactful leadership. Jackson has always been a community in which students, faculty, and distinguished practitioners come together to work on important global problems. As a professional school, the Jackson community will have the resources, scale, and focus to make an even greater difference in the world.  

What was the rationale behind changing the degree name from an M.A. to an M.P.P.? 

Students enrolled in our two-year graduate program have diverse goals but share a commitment to careers as public service professionals. Changing our degree name to an M.P.P. communicates to prospective students and employers our focus on developing the professional skills needed for policymaking leadership. We deliver students an interdisciplinary education that provides them with the ideas, concepts, and skills to be creative problem solvers in a lifelong career in global affairs. Our core curriculum integrates fundamental insights from academic disciplines such as economics, political science, and history with the development of analytical and communication skills. Jackson’s program is intellectually dynamic and challenging but focused on ideas and skill-building directly relevant to a career as global affairs professionals. It is this mission that makes the M.P.P. degree name a great fit.  

What will most distinguish the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs from its peer policy schools? 

Jackson’s M.P.P. occupies a unique place among international affairs graduate programs because of its flexibility and size. The four-course interdisciplinary core curriculum provides students with a shared intellectual foundation focused on acquisition of the ideas, ways of thinking, and skills needed for leadership in global affairs. The small core both prepares students to identify and investigate solutions to the global issues they are most passionate about and gives students the unusual flexibility to design an individualized course of study around those issues by taking advantage of the extraordinary breadth of courses and resources at Jackson and across Yale. With about thirty-five students in each entering class, Jackson’s program is small by design. Our size allows us to deliver distinctive programs such as a writing program integrated into the core curriculum that provides students with extensive training and feedback in writing for different objectives in the policymaking process. It also encourages graduate students to form an intimate and close-knit learning community among themselves as well as with faculty and practitioners.  

How did Jackson prepare you not just for  your first job after graduate school but for  the rest of your career?

What drew me to Jackson was the ability to learn from a diverse group of fields and people. I took classes not just at Jackson but also at the Schools of Management, Law, Public Health, and Forestry & Environmental Studies. This helped me learn how to be a translator between fields and perspectives. For example, in my current job, I may speak with Silicon Valley in the morning and then to an organizer or a scientist in the afternoon—taking courses and learning with leaders in all of those spaces have really helped.

Prior to Yale, you were involved in several non-profit organizations and government agencies. After graduate school, you transitioned into private sector work. How did your Jackson degree help you to make this change?

My career was initially in the global development and humanitarian world. At a certain point, though, I was frustrated not to see more results. Instead, I saw work happening without enough impact and collaboration with the communities that were actually living these challenges. I needed a moment to reflect and reorganize. I was grateful that Jackson gave me an opportunity to do that.

While at Jackson, I ended up building my skills in business strategy and finance. I took this training to my job as vice president at a frontier markets investment firm. One of my favorite projects was a market study on energy-efficient appliance manufacturing in Ghana, and we later advised the government on how to spur more manufacturing. Jackson helped me to make that shift into the private sector.

How would you advise students interested in global development to take advantage of their time at Jackson, given the program’s flexibility?

Don’t be afraid of digging into policy and business approaches—getting outside of the typical tools used by the global development sector will serve your career. Take courses that explore, and really grapple with, criticisms about development aid. I would also suggest taking at least one class on something that you’ve never done before. One of the best classes I took while at Jackson was a six-person, PhD-level history seminar with historian Tim Snyder.

How did you benefit from the Jackson community?

What I loved most about Jackson was the students’ commitment to service. A few of my classmates were former military, for example; despite my being an aid worker at the time, I quickly realized that what we had in common was that we were all committed to serving in some way. Jackson students come from all around the world and from different sectors. Because it’s a small program, we were able to spend time together and expanded each other’s perspectives. It’s a great community.

Ms. Korberg leads the Foundation's efforts to identify new, large-scale opportunities for impact.

Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs’ MA occupies a unique place among international affairs graduate programs. Each candidate pursues an individualized course of study, taking advantage of resources from across the university. For students, this is a remarkable opportunity to study with renowned Yale faculty from all disciplines. Seminars with Senior Fellows--practitioners from the public and private sector--round out the rich offerings from which students may choose. Our small size and approach create a dynamic atmosphere as students become a resource to each other and a window to the diversity and complexity of the global affairs field.

Tell us a little about yourself.

After graduating from college, I served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. My primary role was to advise municipal authorities on how to be more efficient and transparent, and I also hosted a local television show about healthy cooking using low-cost ingredients. The experience was life-changing and set the stage for all of my career and academic pursuits that have followed.

Jackson offers a highly flexible curriculum. How did you tailor your academic experience to meet your interests and career goals?

My academic interests include violence prevention, countering organized crime, and anti-corruption policies. The flexible Jackson curriculum allowed me to take courses across the university that taught these interdisciplinary topics through different lenses. In addition to Jackson's core classes, I studied anti-corruption at Yale Law School, global social entrepreneurship at the School of Management, and data analysis at the Graduate School's statistics department (and that is just to name a few highlights of my time at Yale).

How did you spend the summer between your first and second years of the MA program?

I interned at the Ukrainian chapter of Transparency International, a leading anti-corruption NGO, and was based in Kiev. The internship offered me an invaluable opportunity to research the anti-corruption reforms that were passed after Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity. It was an incredible opportunity to be in the country during such a critical period in its democratic development. A Yale alumnus and the Jackson Institute’s career advisor helped me secure the position, and the Jackson Institute provided grant support that enabled my three-month stay in Kiev. I applied the experience during the following semester when I wrote a seminar paper about anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.

Any special faculty mentors?

Many Jackson Institute professors and senior fellows offered me a superb education in the classroom, office hours, and round table events. Casey King, a faculty member at the Jackson Institute, mentored me beginning in my first semester at Jackson. Professor King not only introduced me to the anti-money laundering field, but he also has served as a regular source of advice on both academic and career matters.

How did your MA degree prepare you for your current role?

The master's program gave me valuable hard skills in statistics, economics, and a foreign language (Russian). A good education is broader than providing specific skills, and Jackson's research seminars prepared me to approach analytical projects with confidence that I can find answers about topics that are new for me.

Stephen Roach became Morgan Stanley’s chief economist in 1991, and was chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia before coming to the Jackson Institute as a Senior Fellow. At Yale, his teaching focuses on Asian economies, and how the interplay between market and government forces impacts ordinary citizens.

You continue to travel all over the world, meeting with economic and political leaders. How do you bring those discussions into the classroom?

By design, my courses are linked to many of the burning issues in the global macro debate. I continue to remain actively engaged with policymakers, government officials, and regulators who play key roles in shaping that debate. In my course “The Next China,” I stress the linkages between ongoing policy pronouncements and China’s rebalancing strategy. It is vital to juxtapose the analytical framework embedded in this course against the ongoing tensions between markets, policy, and politics.

Your book, Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China, looks at the U.S.-China relationship. You’ve been a first-hand witness to the economic relationship between China and the West. How do you hope to prepare students to think about China once they embark on a global affairs–related career?

I didn’t choose the title, Unbalanced, by accident. A key goal in the book, as well as in related classroom discussions, is to encourage my students to stress balance in assessing the economic relationship between the United States and China. All too often, the West blames China for many problems of its own making—from trade deficits and job pressures to environmental degradation and soaring commodity prices. At the same time, China’s perceived sense of a “century of humiliation” colors many of its own perceptions about the West. I frame many aspects of this blame game as the economic equivalent of what psychologists call “codependency”—arguing that the relationship needs to shift to a more constructive interdependency. This is an important distinction for all participants in the global affairs debate.

You also teach a course called “Wall Street and Washington: Markets, Policy, and Politics.” How does understanding the private-public sector connection prepare someone to work in, for example, public policy or a nonprofit?

I lived that connection daily in my forty-year career in financial services, both on the Federal Reserve board and at Morgan Stanley. In public policy, there is no lesson more important than understanding the consequences of your efforts in shaping outcomes in the private sector. Of course, this is also the case for those who work in financial services. The ideal work experience would straddle both realms.

The course allows students to meet with well-placed people in New York and Washington.

What better way to probe the ins and outs of the recent financial crisis than to spend time with those at the center of the events and institutions that shaped the outcome? Students in this course walk away with unique insights into the personal perspectives that will ultimately shape the writing of that important history.