Najam Presents Pardee School at BU Global Development Symposium
The first annual Global Development Symposium of the Boston Univeristy Global Development Consortium was held on Monday, April 27. The symposium brought together a large number of student organizations working towards global development and also included different expert panels and presentations.
Dean Adil Najam of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University was amongst the featured speakers at the symposium and spoke about his own career and interests in global development and about the ‘Advancing Human Progress’ mission of the Pardee School. Prior to his talk a short video on the Pardee School and its mission was shown to the nearly 100 students and guests who attended symposium.
In his talk Dean Najam said that anyone working in global development must learn how to “celebrate small victories” but also be driven by big ambitions – the biggest of which has to be the ambition of making the world a better place. He said that the ambition of “advancing human progress” which has motivated the creation of the Pardee School is exactly such a “big ambition.”
“Having a Global Development Symposium is important because there are so many amazing projects that BU students and professors are involved in, but there has been relatively little effort to integrate these projects and collaborate towards a common goal,” said Jessica Depies, a student in the Pardee School class of 2017 and one of the organizers of the conference. “Our symposium allows students to showcase their own successes while also learning from other students from a variety of academic disciplines involved in the field of global development.”
“The symposium is the result of the efforts of about a dozen student groups on campus, with a core planning team that represents schools from CAS to ENG — all of these student groups and their respective representatives make up our Global Development Consortium, which we hope will continue to grow and host more events of this nature in the future,” Depies said.