Wall Street & Trading

I just finished Karen Ho’s “Liquidated:  An Ethnography of Wall Street”.  It tied together various experiences I had daytrading from 1998-2002 and 2006-2007 and the recruitment sessions that big banks and consulting companies would have for Georgetown Master’s students.
Some things the book helped to confirm:
1) Time differentials.  Wall Street works very often 100-120 hours a [...]

Dreams of the Future

What do I hope to accomplish within my lifetime?
Keeping the American Dream in Perspective

The American Dream is an incredibly alluring concept.  It resonates with me because my parents came from England to work and start a family back in the 60’s, and have done well for themselves.  They were not leaving a horrible situation in [...]

State of the Nation After 9/11/09

Oh man, where to begin.  I think I’ve been a little frustrated lately because I haven’t written in a while.  So let’s get it out there so I can move on.
National Tea Party, 9/12
This last Saturday was the National Tea Party Day in DC.  The Tea Party is a rallying cry for essentially Jeffersonian anti-big [...]

Labor Costs

One of the topics I want to study more about is what we’re all going to do in the future for work and jobs.  Part of the sharp upheaval of the 20th century of rapid economic development was that a stable career was not sustainable except for certain professions.  It is true in the US [...]

Surpluses and Shortages

I’m moving out of my Georgetown rowhouse and just started my job, so I’ve been a little busy and haven’t been able to write much.  That’s one reason Twitter is so great — I’ve been able to just send some quick tweets (the other reason it’s so great is its generativity (see Jonathan Zittrain) — [...]

Big, Interesting, Mysterious Pragmatic Problems

I’ve just finished a master’s program full of amazing classmates seeking policy solutions to some of the toughest problems the US and international institutions have to currently deal with.  For my part, I deeply love to spend a lot of my recreational thinking time searching for gaps in solutions to problems — entrepreneurial thinking — [...]

Life Update Before Graduation

I am about to graduate from my master’s program but before I can do so, I have to write about 70 pages worth of papers.  25 for international negotiation (Iran), 20 for comparative democratization (Iraq), 15 for policies for poverty reduction (Ecuador’s conditional cash transfer program), and another 5-10 pages for a negotiation simulation after-action [...]

Spring Semester, 2009

Here are my classes for my final semester at Georgetown:
Comparative Democratization (GOVT-549)
This course will serve as an introduction to the vast literature on democratization in comparative politics. Democratization is studied here from the perspective of the transition and consolidation processes of the late 20th century. The principal goal of the course is to understand the [...]

Fall Semester, 2008

The fall semester was pretty grueling.
My classes weren’t hard in the same way that International Trade and Development Orthodoxies were for me.  That is, there wasn’t a ton of practicum to get tripped up on.  But there were a lot of moving parts.  I was doing research for the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship and was also doing [...]

Idea for a Georgetown MSFS Start-Up Fund

Hi.  I am currently a second-year student in the Masters of Science in Foreign Service program at Georgetown University.  The program is housed within the School of Foreign Service, one of the best international affairs programs and international development programs in the world.  A list of alumni is at Wikipedia.
I am considering an idea to [...]