A New Series: Bringing My MPA Journey Into the Real World

Over the past year at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, I’ve gone through something I didn’t expect — not just learning, but unlearning; not just absorbing information, but rewiring how I see the world.

Some classes shook my assumptions.
Some readings made me uncomfortable.
Some ideas stayed with me long after the assignment was due.
Some conversations changed how I think about governments, markets, technology, and people altogether.

And the deeper I went, the more I realised something simple:

Academic ideas shouldn’t only live inside universities.
They should live in conversations, in communities, in the everyday world where policies turn into reality.

So I’m starting a new series — a place to unpack the ideas that shaped me during my MPA, in language that anyone can understand. No jargon. No gatekeeping. No “you need a PhD to read this.” Just real reflections on the systems running our lives, written by someone who had to learn (and unlearn) them from scratch.

What this series is about

This isn’t an academic archive.
It’s a translation exercise — one part reflection, one part storytelling, one part “here’s what I wish someone told me before I started studying this stuff.”

In this series, I’ll share:

• Concepts that challenged the way I understood the world

• The moments that made things “click”

• The blind spots I never noticed until they were pointed out

• The messy, complicated intersections of economics, public purpose, technology, and governance

• The things we don’t talk about enough: power, inequality, capacity, design, and who gets left out

And most importantly:
What all of this means for real people outside the classroom.

What to expect

Some posts will be short — a single idea that stayed with me.
Others will be rewrites of my papers, translated into real, readable English.

Some will be personal.
Some will be analytical.
All will be honest.

This isn’t about offering perfect solutions.
It’s about opening doors.
It’s about letting people peek behind the curtain of policy school and take what’s useful for their own thinking and their own lives.

What I hope you get out of it

If nothing else, I hope this series reminds you that the systems around us — the economy, the state, the market, technology — weren’t handed down from nature.They were built by people. They can be understood by people. And they can be changed by people too.

If one idea sparks curiosity, or helps you make sense of something you’ve always felt but never had the words for, then this series will have done its job.

Thanks for being here.
Let’s start unlearning together.