From Berlin to the Beltway: Lessons from a semester at Georgetown

A university exchange is a strange thing.

You choose to leave your home university, your friends, and your city for a months-long submersion into another life, without any guarantee that it will be any better, exciting, or even easy. On the contrary: it's never easy!

So why do we do it? Well, let me share with you a bit about my own experience on exchange, and what studying at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy in the Fall of 2024 gave me. But first, let's set the scene.

Born in Mexico City and raised in Vancouver, I pursued and completed a dual-bachelors degree between Sciences Po of Paris and the Sauder Business School at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for my undergraduate studies. One half political scientist, one half international business major, all-parts NAFTA baby. After my bachelors, I spent some years working in Vancouver, sharpening the analytical and early computational skills I'd picked up across industries like marine preservation and resource consulting.

With this background, an increasing interest in coding and statistics, and a longing to be back in Europe, I decided that I wanted to pursue a technical degree on the old continent. And guess who had just inaugurated their new Master of Data Science for Public Policy degree in Berlin? The stage was set. Thus, against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, I set off towards the Bundesrepublik in August of 2022.

Now, a careful reader may note that this experience (coming to Germany from Canada for university) was already a serious 'study abroad', and they'd be right in thinking so! With this same thinking, I very quickly decided that I was not interested in doing a study abroad that would take me away from Berlin. I was already away from Canada, in a new city, in a new culture, in a new university, and Germany had quickly become a home away from home; even its weather felt familiar (turns out Canada prepares you well for freezing arctic winds). I was quite happy with the city and with how things were and decided that I would follow the study path of Year 1 -> Professional Year -> Year 2 without any study abroad, maximizing my time in this lovely city. However, if I've learned anything from the complex field of Bayesian Statistics, it's that conclusions often change when given new information.

For me, this new information came in the form of seeing my own Hertie peers go on their exchanges during my professional year and, well, I guess the grass looked wonderfully greener! After speaking with these friends about their time abroad in Bucharest, Cairo, Tokyo... I soon found myself reconsidering my position on the matter. After some lengthy reflection, I decided I would apply to study abroad for my second year at Hertie.

However, choosing to study abroad is only half the battle. The next question is where to go!

For me, the choice came down to deciding between Beijing's Tsinghua University and Washington D.C.'s Georgetown. In the end, I sided with Georgetown for a few reasons.

First: politics. Understandably for those of us (all of us) in the domain of public policy, I had held a serious fascination with American politics since 2016, and its election unlike any other. 2016 was also my first year of university, and the US election's effect on the course of American politics and even global politics stuck with me as the years went on, holding a grip on my curiosity.

My second reason for choosing Georgetown was more exploratory: even having grown up in Mexico and Canada, and having visited New York and other US hallmarks, I had still never been to DC (the heart of the empire!). Culturally, socially, anthropologically, phenomenologically, I thought it an important 'pilgrimage' of sorts for those of us who grew up in its sphere of influence and now studied politics and government.

Finally, and most importantly, I did it for my career, and not in the sense of pedigree. What I mean is: D.C. is one of the largest (in influence) and most 'important' administrative centers of the world. A city of this weight would be a unique opportunity to see all the sides of government, its adjacent industries, and the ecosystems that surround the public sector. A semester studying in its center, at one of its top political universities, would probably broaden my horizons and inspire new visions of the future for a career. And well? It did. But more on this later. First, the trenches.

Moving somewhere new is never easy. We face new bureaucracies, isolation, cultural differences…etc. Add to it the pressures of university life, and the experience can be a daunting one! While definitely true for my time in D.C., I have to say that it had so many more positive surprises than it did difficulties.

The first, and largest challenge, is usually the culture. For me, the North American culture has never been something too distant, nor something I thought I would be shocked by (again: NAFTA baby). However, there's always things you don't expect. For example, living in the heart of the country, living outside of Capital One Stadium, and forgetting just how much Americans love their spectacles, food, sports, and stars, is something that I'd really forgotten while in Berlin. As well, I was surprised by just how beautiful D.C. actually is as a city. It is truly remarkable how beautifully the 'North' and 'South' meet at confluence in the District of Columbia.

Interestingly, the cultural shocks of society didn't hit nearly as hard as the cultural shock I felt in the academics: in short, I found a large difference in the European approach of theory vs. the American love for application. Coming from the German environment, where the pursuit of theory is an end in itself, and rigour is the cornerstone of research, I was taken aback by the fast-paced and results-focused culture of US schooling. To give a simple example, Georgetown had a greater quantity and frequency of assignments, but gave less concern to their 'airtightness' or intellectual footing. The work was by no means easy, but I found that the American system rewarded speed in connecting ideas to solutions in a way that promoted quick thinking over prolonged debate. Move fast and break things, indeed! My courses evidenced this (even in their titles) and were hugely rewarding in a fresh and new way.

I took four classes while at Georgetown's McCourt School, two of which were specific to data science, and two that were focused on contemporary debates in the field of policy. The data science classes, "Applied Neural Networks" and "Advanced Modeling Techniques", deepened my understanding of huge concepts like image generation through convolutional methods or the sharpening of models through adversarial networks, as well as more micro tools such as unsupervised clustering or term frequency analyses, highly relevant and applicable methods which I went on to apply in my thesis back at Hertie!

The other two classes I took, "Policy Issues in Big Data and AI" and "Policy, Politics, and the Media", focused on more abstract questions influencing policy debates, and shone most strongly for the professors which headed them. For the Big Data and AI course, the professor had been an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in matters of privacy and data security, and had over a decade of experience at Google's competition counsel division.

Meanwhile, the professor of the politics and media course had been a long-time journalist and columnist for the Washington Post, and was an unbelievable treasure-trove of experiences, relationships, and intellect.  Overall, while I found the culture of Georgetown and the McCourt School to be much more application-oriented than I had anticipated, and I still left feeling challenged and satisfied, and more crucially, genuinely inspired to forge a path in the public sector!

Finally, even further than academic matters, in Georgetown I met some true friends and inspiring peers. At McCourt, the diversity of the student body in interests and backgrounds, as well as the three programs it offers of International Development, Public Policy, and Data Science for Public Policy, showed me a kind of mirror image of our own Hertie microcosm, and of our generation at large. In conversations with these students, it was endlessly interesting to hear what had brought them to study in D.C., what challenges their communities faced (in the US or abroad), their views on the EU/US relationship, and more than anything, what drove them in life. A Californian statistics major researching truancy, a Capitol Hill pundit and tech policy expert from Seattle, an education policy specialist from Panama, a Colombian development economist, a second-generation Mexican working to bring more Latino representation to government, and so much more! Truly inspiring.

But, of course, all good things come to an end, and after so many experiences alongside this amazing cohort, such as watching the 2024 presidential debate, attending talks on election security with the Election Assistance Commission, hearing the ex-ambassador for Russia speak on Ukraine, attending Harris' final rally at the Ellipse, and visiting the phenomenal African-American history museum, my time in D.C. sadly came to an end.

And so, after this American semester, this fun and challenging experience, what can I say about why we choose to do an exchange? Why go through all the trouble and time? There are certainly many reasons, and personal ones also, but I think we choose to go abroad because new horizons have colours we've never seen before. We go out and meet the 'different' because it is foreign and strange, and in taking the time to live and understand it, we grow.

After my time in the US in 2024, and after this final semester and thesis at Hertie, I can't name every single thing that I've learned or lived or amassed, but nurture might be greater than nature, and we carry these experiences forward wherever we go.

For me, Hertie and D.C. have been exciting and fresh, and I feel proud and thankful of all I've done in Berlin and abroad in the past 3 years. Looking to the future, I remain enamoured with the field of electoral behaviour and demographic statistics and hope to convert this passion into a rewarding career both in Berlin and eventually back in Canada. With all that has happened in the world since I first began my bachelor in 2016, and seeing the challenging roads ahead, I feel hugely motivated and fiercely intent on finding paths that take this world in the right direction. I leave Hertie, Georgetown, and this master's degree with a sense of accomplishment and gratitude, and absolutely no regrets. So my advice to you: go do that study abroad!