Welcome back returning Fordies!

August 27, 2014

As our new and returning Fordies settle in at Weill Hall, we'd like to share a few highlights from the summer:

We were thrilled to get a series of "field reports" from students on their internship experiences.

  • Nick Pfost kicked off the series with a pfost from Maine, where he was interning with EqualityMaine.
  • Michele Majors wrote in from Geneva, where she was interning with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
  • DuoDuo Zhang penned hers in Washington, DC, where she spent the summer working with the Congressional Management Foundation.

A number of you attended Centennial Ford School Spirit Day events, which brought Fordies together from Ann Arbor to London to Tokyo to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the school's founding. We’ve got a fun Flickr album with photos—check it out.

Alumni have been busy, as well, including:

Ford School alum Steven T. Corliss (MPP/JD ’88), who announced the UN Refugee Agency's Safe Access to Fuel and Energy (SAFE) initiative. In its first two years, the initiative is expected to provide 175,000 stoves and 150,000 solar-power lanterns to refugees around the world.

And faculty have been doing all sorts of interesting work. A full list of faculty news stories is posted on our new web site, but here are two features:

  • Susan Dynarski's research on college financial aid reform was adopted by Senators Lamar Alexander and Michael Bennet as part of a bipartisan bill to simplify the college financial aid application process.
  • A study directed by Barry Rabe and colleagues showed that there was broad public support for a carbon tax if the money was used to fund research into renewable energy.