Alumni Feature | Amrutha Jose Pampackal, Master’s in Public Policy ‘16

Amrutha is a member of the first cohort of MPP students at NLSIU. Her tryst with public policy started through an internship during her undergraduate days at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, where she was pursuing English literature. This internship, with the think tank Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies (RGICS), piqued her interest in public policy and led her to work full-time as a research assistant to Members of Parliament for two years. It was her involvement in various policy processes during the years at RGICS that motivated Amrutha to academically engage in the discipline of public policy. Amrutha feels that the combination of classroom-based courses, fieldwork based learning and client-led project built into the MPP curriculum at NLS gave her the unique opportunity to gain an in-depth knowledge of both theory and practice of public policy. “I am particularly grateful for the last 6 months of the programme during which I got to pursue well-guided research as part of my masters’ dissertation. Not only did my dissertation lead to various academic publications, but more importantly, the process instilled in me the passion and confidence to pursue a career in research,” she says. After MPP, Amrutha worked with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in their Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell University. As part of her PhD, she studies the political economy of tribal communities’ access to food. She is one of the few recipients of the research scholarship offered by the Tata Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, which allows her to conduct two years of rigorous fieldwork-based research among tribal communities in Odisha. Amrutha enjoys teaching and has been working as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Global Development at Cornell for the last two years.