Learning to build from the successes your community already has, honing leadership and evaluation skills, and learning how to move forward with your community as one has been an incredibly valuable experience. It has given me project management and leadership skills that will be directly applicable to my chosen career.
I applied for the Master’s program to facilitate positive change in my community, but soon realized that I had also started a positive change in myself. It challenged me to work harder, read more, and to benefit from the professional knowledge of the other students in my cohort. I’ve been able to disseminate learning to my community and facilitate the starting point for desired changes immediately.
While in the program, I learned that community potential and resources are far better and more sustainable than outside help. We have shifted to giving greater responsibility to community leadership in project implementation. The results are remarkable. Our project rate has come under twelve months unlike the two years we had during the past.
I came from…a very rigorous style of education and I felt that I learned stuff but it wasn’t stuff I could use in the real-world; it was interesting and fun but not that useful and I think that this [program’s] applied way of teaching is invaluable; there’s nothing I can take from any one class or even an experience outside the classroom setting that won’t relate to me in the future.
