Development Practice Student and Graduate Profiles

What was the best thing about your Development Practice program? 

• The variety of students, primarily internationals, who studied alongside me, sharing their rich experience of life in their home countries. These stories added such depth to the learning, and again provided wonderful reality to the theory.

What advice would you give to students in the same degree you studied? 

• To those considering studies in the MDP programme, I would say go ahead. Take every opportunity to talk to students from other countries, even other cities, and learn from the depth of experience and knowledge of the extensive range of academics who teach into this programme. Their knowledge is perhaps one of, if not the, greatest attribute for the programme! I would say to new students, enjoy the experience and embrace what is shared. It too might change the course of your life!

What challenges have you come across in your career, and how did your degree help you overcome them?

• One challenge is the realisation that one degree, i.e the MDP, will deliver the absolute direction for the rest of your life. Getting through the MDP particularly the assessments, was a tough time for me. But the opportunities to learn from others, work in groups, and reflect on world issues has helped me to realise that the completing the MDP laid stones in my pathway, stones that although hard in strength, can move and roll with what comes. The MDP has provided me with those stones and I am moving along with the opportunities that it and consequent opportunities bring.

What was the most important thing you learnt/or most defining experience, you had while studying Development Practice at UQ?  

• In my life, because of the MDP, I now have knowledge which enables me to understand the pitfalls and opportunities available to me as a development practitioner. I have been able to adapt that knowledge to identify opportunities for development applied to the industry of secondary resource management, or more commonly known as waste management. I also reflect on the opportunity to conduct field work. Making sense of daily practice and considering the practice from a community-focused, development centric perspective was absolutely informed by the experience of the MDP programme. That programme without doubt, changed the course of my life; a change for which I am eternally grateful.

What did your study lead to? 

• Initially, the programme helped me to gain access to employment in a role which required a worldview that I had no knowledge of before starting the MDP. Because I was able to select a range of courses from the school of what was then Geography, Planning and Environmental Management and add these to core courses on community development and politics of development, I delivered a well-rounded perspective to my employer, something which they valued highly.

How did your study help you to get to your current role, and what does your current role involve? 

• This has led me to my current role, which is as a full-time PhD Candidate in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at UQ. My research focuses on mapping the flow of plastic food and beverage packaging material to and through small island developing states in the Pacific and Caribbean derived. I am looking to identify locally appropriate innovation that can change how plastic flows in these contexts. Conducting fieldwork in Vanuatu, Barbados, St Vincent & the Grenadines as well as Seychelles, making sense of what I was seeing on a daily basis and considering the daily practice from a community-focused, development centric perspective was absolutely informed by the experience of the MDP programme. That programme without doubt, changed the course of my life; a change for which I am eternally grateful.