While Economics and Environmental Studies have tons of crossover and relate very well for me as a program of study, it was hard for me to define a definite area of interest for a long time. I knew that I had an interest in Public Policy— this was the reason I declared an Economics major to begin with. What clicked for me was when I realized that, to pursue a career in Public Policy, the city to be in was Washington, DC, where I spent my teenage years growing up. Once I accepted this, all sorts of associations came rushing in.
Moving from a rural-ish suburb of Boston to the big city of Washington, DC at the age of thirteen had come as a shock to me, to be sure, but I quickly grew to love it. In particular, I loved to observe the intricacy of how all the moving parts of the city interacted— the transportation networks where people took trains, buses, and cars from their homes to their workplaces, the housing developments that grew up around them, and the public works developed to suit their needs. And guiding it all was the ever-present, nearly-palpable political process that pervades our nation’s capital, nudging and assisting in the lives of the citizens that live there.
At this time in my life, I was being trained as a designer, and the urban scenes I saw around me inspired me in the painting and sculpture studios. When I returned to thinking about the city as an Economics and Environmental Studies student, however, I began to see how my notions of the city as a system have evolved since then. I am still a designer, but what I want to design now are approaches to the problems that arise when people and industry are concentrated in such a small space— problems such as congestion, pollution, and justice (which are definitely different degrees of difficult in addressing). For now, though, my near-term goal is to better understand how Urban Design and Planning functions as a discipline. I recently confirmed a summer internship in City and Regional Planning with the International Economic Development Council, right in my big city of Washington, DC. With a little luck and some concerted effort, I will come out of this experience with a direction to take in my pursuit of the urban.