Can you tell us a bit about your experience with the dual degree between the Geneva Graduate Institute and Harvard Kennedy School?

From Geneva to Harvard: A Two-Year Journey

I completed a dual degree in International Development and Public Administration through the Geneva Graduate Institute and Harvard Kennedy School. It is a two-year programme, with the first year in Geneva and the second at Harvard. I used to joke that I was on the “UN Secretary-General track,” since former UN Secretary-General (SG) Kofi Annan studied at the Geneva Graduate Institute and former SG Ban Ki-moon at Harvard Kennedy School. Looking back, I think that joke also carried a certain pride in how both schools have shaped leaders on the international stage.

In practice, the two years lived up to that joke, through genuinely intense and deeply enriching experiences. In my first year, I worked on the ARP, a capstone in Geneva that not only deepened my expertise in international development, but also expanded my expert network. In my second year at Harvard, I learned different ways of turning academic knowledge into policy, including not just how to design effective policy, but how to communicate it to broader audiences, including public and key stakeholders. The final piece of the programme is the Master thesis, which pulls together everything I built over those two years. It is submitted to the Geneva Graduate Institute, and students can choose a co-supervisor for it. I worked with one supervisor from each institution, the Institute and Harvard, which gave me a valuable dual perspective on my research.

What kind of classes have you taken at each institution? 

The Institute gave me depth, Harvard gave me breadth

At the Geneva Graduate Institute, I built up my research skills through courses in research methods and statistics, and deepened my subject knowledge through classes on international development and related topics. Through the ARPs, I applied this knowledge in the field, working directly with experts and learning from them. At Harvard, the focus shifted toward bringing that in-depth knowledge out into the world, engaging with broader audiences, from stakeholders to the general public. Through classes like Negotiation, Speechwriting and Leadership, I learned how to reach and persuade a much wider range of people and turn that into actual policy. Looking back, those two years shaped me into someone who can think more deeply and communicate more broadly.

Which aspects of studying at the Institute and at Harvard, in your experience, have been the most different? And which have been the most complementary? 

The Courage to Act, the Courage to Listen

Both the Institute and Harvard were places where learning happened as much outside the classroom as inside it. In Geneva, the emotion I felt most strongly was solidarity. Gathered in the humanitarian capital of the world, those of us studying international development shared a common purpose, figuring out how to make the world a better place. We would learn international humanitarian law in the morning, then take that knowledge to the streets in the evening to speak up about humanitarian crises around the world.

At Harvard, students pursued far more varied careers, and with that came a far wider range of perspectives. If Geneva gave me comrades who shared my commitment to international development, Harvard gave me sparring partners who constructively challenged my thinking. Difficult conversations came up often, on topics I had never seen debated in Geneva. Questions that felt almost settled in Geneva, such as whether foreign aid should continue or whether borders should stay open to migrants, became genuinely contested at Harvard. Thanks to those debates, I had many chances to hear from people who saw things very differently than I did. I learned that solving real problems requires understanding them from multiple angles, starting with genuine dialogue with people whose views differ from my own.

The Institute, grounded in solidarity, gave me the courage to act. Harvard, grounded in respect, taught me the courage to face differences. With colleagues who shared my convictions and the sparring partners who sharpened my thinking, I believe I can run this long, demanding race called international development with balance.

What is special about Geneva and Boston as a student? 

Double the City, Double the Network

Networking is, without question, the greatest advantage students at Geneva Graduate Institute and Harvard Kennedy School get to enjoy.

The Institute is surrounded by international organisations and INGOs. Attending UN meetings big and small, and meeting leaders who shape international development policy at forums hosted by the school, is simply part of daily life. And because so many countries’ permanent missions are based in Geneva, it is the ideal place to experience multilateral diplomacy firsthand.

Meanwhile, at Harvard Kennedy School, political leaders from all around the world would come to speak in person at the Kennedy Forum. Listening to heads of state, senior US officials and opinion leaders across every field helped me build a global perspective and a sharper political instinct.

Beyond these established leaders, both schools also offer plenty of opportunities to connect with rising ones. Geneva runs exchange programmes with leading universities both within Switzerland and around the world and several of my friends broadened their perspectives that way. At Harvard, Cambridge itself, where the school is located, is a hub of academia. Nearby are MIT, Tufts, and countless other universities, all open to cross-registration if you are willing to make the effort. I took a statistics course at MIT myself, and I remember being genuinely struck by how different the academic culture and atmosphere felt. Not to mention, there is the whole world of Ivy League athletic rivalries, an experience in itself.

Through this range of exchange programmes, students get to meet and build relationships with current and future leaders across countries and fields, and I think that is a privilege unique to dual degree students at these two schools.

You were able to work on an ARP during your year in Geneva – can you tell us about your project and what it contributed to your studies? 

Reading Opportunity Into Crisis: What My ARP Left Me With

I worked on a research project titled “Future of Aid” with the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) as our client. At the time, global crises were only intensifying, yet major donor countries were cutting aid budgets. SDC asked our team to examine how the international development landscape was shifting and how traditional and emerging donors were each responding to this moment. We interviewed 15 organisations across the sector, listening closely to how each of them envisioned the future of aid.

What we found was that while the crisis was real, the future of aid itself was not fading away. The discourse and practice of aid kept evolving, toward stronger regional cooperation, approaches that prioritised national interests and greater support for global public goods. And most importantly, the international development community as a whole was not giving up on its future. Even as traditional donors stepped back, other entities, such as the private sector and emerging donors, were stepping in to fill the space they left behind, making the field, long dominated by the Global North, more equal.

This experience taught me something important: rather than accepting a widely circulated narrative at face value, it is worth listening to a range of voices and examining the reality myself. That habit stayed with me throughout the rest of my studies, questioning whatever narrative dominated the room, and looking for the opportunities quietly taking shape in the space it left behind.

For me, the ARP was never just a report to be written and filed away. I shared our findings from the Future of Aid research on the Center for International Development (CID) blog at Harvard Kennedy School, reaching the broader international development community there. I then sent the article to my SDC client and to the interviewees who had made the research possible, along with a note of thanks. As a result, I was able to build deeper relationships with people I might otherwise have only crossed paths with once. On a side note, I even worked up the courage to send the piece to a Nobel laureate in economics, who was kind enough to write back saying he would give it a read. I am still sharing this ARP with the international development community today, using it to spark discussion, and continuing to refine the original findings based on what comes out of those conversations. Which is why my ARP is still very much a work in progress.

What has been the highlight of your dual degree so far?

Conflict Was Never the Problem

Looking back, the highlights were having fondue at Bains des Pâquis with friends, screaming my lungs out at Fenway Park, and, above all, sitting through the difficult conversations.

If the Institute taught me how to work through disagreements with people who shared the same goals but wanted to get there differently, Harvard taught me how to understand people aiming somewhere else entirely. Harvard pushed us to talk with people who saw the world very differently from us. It was not unusual to see students from opposing political parties, or from opposing sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sitting on the lawn in conversation. These were never easy, putting real stress on everyone involved. I avoided them at first, until a friend told me: if we cannot have hard conversations even here, in one of the safest places in the world, where else are we supposed to have them? From then on, I made a conscious effort to lean into difficult conversations. The school backed this up, too, running sessions on the art of disagreement and how to listen to extreme views.

Before this programme, I thought of conflict as something inherently bad. But conflict is unavoidable as long as we live alongside one another. What matters is whether we are willing to sit with the discomfort, talk it through, and try to understand the other side. The world is growing more polarised by the day: we gravitate toward neighbors who look like us, and wherever someone does not fit into “us,” we shut them out. Where conversation disappears, self-interest and isolation take root. I want to take the courage I built at the Institute and Harvard, the courage to face conflict and talk it through and put it toward stitching this polarised world back together.