IFEP Concentration Hosts Technology Panel

The aim of the panel was to investigate core questions surrounding SIPA's relevance to the burgeoning technology sector. While panelists tended to agree that technology companies appreciate the policy education offered at SIPA, this knowledge is often of little benefit to job candidates who are bereft of additional skills. Former Google employee Ben Green remarked that large, international firms appreciate a command of public policy, particularly where a nation's domestic policy intersects with prospective lines of businesses. However, Google (and other firms) reserve executive and managerial positions for those with an engineering background, limiting career growth options for SIPA students. To that effect, Yana Krasnitskaya - who interned with Salesforce in the summer of 2012 - noted that SIPA students can market their policy command and have a leg up over other candidates by having a command of basic hard skills, including rudimentary programming knowledge, which would allow a SIPA student to be able to "talk the talk" of the tech sector.

With nearly a decade at Oracle, Elena Avesani was decidedly positive about the value-added education SIPA provides. Although she is an engineer by training, she said SIPA's rigorous emphasis on economics and trade has helped her understand how trade and industrial policy impact Oracle's business development strategies in China. Similarly, Sunil Arora, an employee for the Mountain View, California, based startup Addepar, believes that SIPA - and the IFEP concentration in particular - empower astute students for careers in the tech sector, as long as they understand where their skills would be best put to use. For example, the largely conservative financial sector is widely believed to be underutilizing innovations brought about by tech startups, including advanced trading platforms and wealth management services. Students with a command of finance and some technical proficiency in widely used coding languages could be very competitive in the tech sector. Ultimately, like everything, it is all about timing.

-- John Stinson MPA '13