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After three years in the making, MPS alumni showed up in royal numbers to welcome the new MPSers into the regieme at our fall mixer. Program Director Anindya Sen was elated with the over 120 students, alumni, and distinguished public servant mentors that were in attendance, but gave special recognition to the alumni pictured to the left in a shoutout on Facebook.

While her high school education in Hong Kong nurtured her strengths in sciences, Gigi Chan (MPS '22) explored her interest in social and political issues as an undergraduate student in Canada. Working on a housing policy capstone project at the University of Toronto, she discovered that public policy could merge her aptitude for evidence-based analysis and passion for societal impact. “I realized that I enjoy working in public policy and I thought there might be a career in it.”

Even a worldwide pandemic can’t break the Master of Public Service’s 8-year record for 100% co-op employment for all their determined students. 

“Give them a long round of applause and celebrate their accomplishment,” says program director Professor Anindya Sen. “This was the most challenging round of coop matches ever. Quite a few positions were cancelled and delayed. And it was so stressful for the cohort. However, they went with the flow, kept applying, and with some help from our network, coop positions came through and people have employment.”

The Master of Public Service (MPS) program hosted the second annual Policy Datafest last week with more than 70 graduate students digging into public datasets to extract meaningful narratives and recommend policies for positive change.

While much of the world is talking big data, the story in Canada seems to be our shortage of it.

Recent media reports about our country’s data deficit may be true to an extent, says Anindya Sen, professor of Economics, but there are actually good datasets available through open government portals. The challenge is fully utilizing them to make informed policy decisions that improve people’s lives.

There has been recent discussion on the existence of several different data gaps across economic, social and political divides — deficits that are left unaddressed at our own peril. But there is another deficit that has, I would argue, gone relatively unnoticed but is no less important: Canada’s skills gap in data analysis.

"Smokes, Smugglers, and Lost Tax Revenues and how should governments respond? That's the question that MPS Program Director Anindya Sen examined in his recent report published by the C.D. Howe Institute.  You can see Professor Sen speak in more detail about this report in various media outlets. 

The skill sets that I got in the MPS program like briefing notes, stakeholder analysis, jurisdictional analysis I was using at day one in my co-op -  Whitney Philippi, Class of 2015

Zuhair Zaidi, a student in the Master of Public Service program at Waterloo, has been interested in Canadian politics since the age of 15. Thanks to Waterloo’s flexibility in allowing students to arrange their own jobs, Zaidi landed a co-op work term in the House of Commons this past spring.