On October 15th, the Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management (FSPPM) held its Opening Ceremony for the 2020 Master in Public Policy cohort.
At the ceremony, faculty and staff welcomed fifty-eight new students, comprising thirty students in the Policy Analysis concentration and twenty-eight students in the new Leadership and Management concentration.
This is the first time the Master in Public Policy program has two majors. Full-time Policy Analysis students study for fifteen months with courses in English counting for the majority of instruction. Leadership and Management students study for eighteen months, studying every two months for nine days with Vietnamese as the language of instruction.
Incoming Masters students were selected through a rigorous process that included satisfying a number of entry requirements: Having a minimum of five years of post-graduate work experience, writing essays, interviews, entrance examinations, and taking standardized tests like the GRE.
Dr. Vu Thanh Tu Anh, Director of FSPPM said, “Ninety-five percent of you students are working. To be able to sit here today, many of you have to think carefully, even making trade-offs between your personal and professional lives.”
New graduates come from all regions of the country: 47% are working in the public sector; 19% from universities and research institutes; 29% from businesses and 5% from social organizations.
“Expect the students to follow the tradition inherited from the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (FETP),” Dr. Vu Thanh Tu Anh continued: “His father has a ‘fire tests gold, work ethic’, we hope that Fulbright’s rigorous training process will help you grow into managers, leaders, and policy analysts in the near future.”
Sharing this expectation, Mary Tarnowka, United States Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, said, “Public issues are rarely resolved themselves; instead, they are resolved by active leadership. These incoming students will demonstrate their leadership to help improve people’s lives and policies.”
The Opening Ceremony of the 2020 Public Policy Master Program marks the second year of FSPPM as a school part of Fulbright University Vietnam with many improvements in curriculum design and content, learning, and pedagogy. For example, this year the school will use the “flipped classroom” model to create a flexible learning environment, build a student learning culture, and optimize classroom study time.
The opening ceremony was attended by Mary Tarnowka, US Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City, Dr. Ryan Derby-Talbot, Chief Academic Officer at Fulbright, Dr. Vu Thanh Tu Anh, FSSPM Director, faculty, staff and alumni of Fulbright.
