Fundraising, with a twist of humor

Earlier this month the SAIS Bologna student body took a break from weekend trips around Europe and studying to participate in an evening of rollicking entertainment and generous fundraising.

BC Journal Editor-in-Chief
Jamie Pleydell-Bouverie
ran the show

You'd be excused for thinking it's a strange combination, linking a mock beauty pageant with a live auction of often humorous goods and services. But even graduate students deserve a bit of bizarre fun every once and a while.

The annual Mr. and Ms. SAIS Competition and Charity Auction kicked off early in the evening with three men and three women competing for the illustrious titles.

The evening alternated between pageant and live auction. There were segments devoted to “Questions and Answers,” “Talent” and “Formal Wear” in the Mr. and Ms. SAIS pageant, with "Food and Wine” and “Services” in the auction segment.

Having fun

The rules? Contestants had to be students, and auction items had to come from the Bologna and SAIS communities.

During the pageant, contestants wowed the judges, comprised of SAIS staff and Giulio of caffè fame, with answers to hard-hitting questions. “Should Narnia be allowed to go nuclear?” “Is Chris Brown and Rihanna’s new collaboration an example of a rigid alliance with flexible strategies or a flexible alliance with rigid strategies?”

The audience seemed more than impressed with their peers’ talent, including interpretive dance demonstrations, expert shot pouring and the SAIS student band rocking out to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”

With the auction the SAIS Bologna community came together to offer more than 35 items, with proceeds benefiting the student-run Bologna Center Journal of International Affairs.

Mr. & Ms. SAIS

The big ticket items included a poker night at our director’s house with a few notoriously interesting professors, a ride in our resident IR professor’s snazzy Porshe and an African dinner for six prepared by three SAIS students to incorporate the flavors of their respective countries -- Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ghana.

The night ended with a newly crowned Mr. and Ms. SAIS -- Staci Raab and James Mina -- who will enjoy the titles until a new royal couple ascends to the throne next year.

Until then, many satisfied students look forward to eating, wearing, drinking, riding, playing and listening to their purchased auction items. And there's a very satisfied BC Journal fundraising team.

A book for the younger generations

You've heard this before: SAIS Bologna students learn inside and outside the classroom. This year the Bologna Institute for Policy Research (BIPR) is teaming up with city's best known international book store to spread the word outside the four walls of via Belmeloro 11.

Earlier this month, SAIS Bologna Prof. John Harper launched his latest book, The Cold War, at an event organized by BIPR and hosted by Feltrinelli International at their teeming book store in the center of Bologna. It followed on the footsteps of the recent launch of Prof. Mark Gilbert's book, European Integration: A Concise History.

Prof. John Harper

A pillar of SAIS Bologna's faculty, Prof. Harper has taught American foreign policy to several generations of students (including my colleague Nelson Graves).

We took the opportunity to ask Prof. Harper some questions.

Q: What is your book about?
Harper: It's a narrative history of the East-West conflict known as the Cold War. That is, it covers the period 1945-90 approximately but includes historical background on the two major protagonists of the story, Russia and the United States.

Q: How did the book come about? 
Harper: The book was commissioned by Oxford University Press in the UK to be part of their new "Oxford Histories" series. I was happy to accept their offer since I have been teaching the subject for many years.

Q: Who would enjoy reading the book?
Harper: The book is mainly designed for students and other young people (like my daughters, aged 19 and 26) for whom the subject is something they heard their parents and grandparents talking about but didn't live first-hand. It tries to explain, among other things, why the world lived on nuclear tenterhooks for much of the 45-50 year period in question, but also why the Cold War remained "cold" at least as far as Europe was concerned.

Q: What role has SAIS played in your book?
Harper: SAIS played a role in that some of the material in the book is based on lectures given in my classes on U.S. foreign policy, and there were a number of students who assisted with the research along the way.

Q: Your next work?
Harper: My next book will be a study focusing on a crucial moment in the Cold War, early 1950, something I did not have sufficient time and space (the book is a compact history) to explore.

Amina Abdiuahab

The next steps to the finish line

SAIS Bologna candidates are understandably getting itchy as they await the outcome of their applications to study here in 2012-13.

Here are the next steps in the process for non-U.S. candidates (U.S. candidates, who are handled by the DC Admissions Office, have already been contacted):

- Faculty and staff on the SAIS Bologna Admissions Committee have been interviewing candidates and reviewing the dossiers. Their work is about over. The committee will meet next week to take its admissions decisions. We hope to communicate those decisions to all candidates by Friday, April 6.

Some important details such as financial aid grants, economics or English language requirements and admission to the International Development concentration may have to wait a few more days. We are aware that some candidates will be facing deadlines from other programs, and we want to make sure they have time to take the best decision.

We are planning two events to answer any questions from admitted candidates and to enable them to know us better:

1. an online Q&A session planned for April 25;
2. Open House at SAIS Bologna on May 3&4.

We'll be circulating more details on these events later.

- There are two separate deadlines for admitted non-U.S. candidates to matriculate:

May 9 for candidates offered financial aid;
May 16 for all other candidates

- The summer online Principles of Economics course for any incoming students who have not satisfied both the introductory micro and introductory macro requirements starts on May 23.

- The deadline for registering for the SAIS Bologna pre-term is July 2. The pre-term session will run this year from August 27 to September 19.

The pre-term session in Washington will run from July 30 to August 25. The deadline for registering for the DC session is June 29.

If you are a candidate awaiting the Admissions Committee's decision, why not use the next few days to make  a mental note of what you've learned during the process? It could end up helping you in the future.

Nelson Graves

"... a novel experiment in American graduate education"

"The purposes of The Johns Hopkins University are to increase human knowledge, to instruct students and to guide them into the fields of productive scholarship."

So proclaimed a university catalogue written just after the birth of SAIS Bologna in 1955 and devoted to the fledgling graduate program.

The 20-page document gives a glimpse -- all text, no pictures -- into the early days of SAIS Bologna. Much has changed, of course. But all in all, a lot has remained the same.

A year's tuition in 1955 was $800. Living costs for a single student -- room, food and incidentals -- were estimated at $20 a week.

The good old days.

SAIS's mission statement still rings true. "Combining high academic standards with a practical approach to current world problems, the aim of the School is to provide a limited number of qualified students with a type of instruction and training designed to prepare them for careers in the international field."

There was recognition that SAIS was breaking new ground by opening centers in Bologna and Rangoon, Burma (Yangon, Myanmar).

The catalogue called the centers "a novel experiment in American graduate education inasmuch as they represent physical extensions of an American graduate institution to areas of specialized instruction."

To this day one of SAIS's distinguishing characteristics is the opportunity to pursue its curriculum on several continents. A year of study at SAIS Bologna followed by a year in DC is a unique combination. And SAIS is also present in Nanjing.

(We once held a weekly quiz on the center in Burma -- and on its demise in 1959.)

A career in the international field, the catalogue says, calls for a thorough understanding of international law and organization, international economics, European diplomatic history and the development and administration of American foreign relations.

Naturally SAIS Bologna's curriculum has evolved and grown since the Cold War to adapt to the changed  international landscape. Now students can concentrate in a much wider range of subjects: international development, conflict management, studies of regions well beyond Europe and the United States.

I will note two other things that have changed:

- the student body was capped at 60 back then whereas this year we have some 190 students;
- the lowest passing grade was "B" compared to "B-" today.

Grade deflation -- an unusual notion.

Nelson Graves

Finance in the real world

Finance is fun. Really.

The BC Finance Club is a 40-member tour-de-force of personality and progress. Finance wasn’t studied at SAIS Bologna at the outset 57 years ago. But in recent years it found its home in the curriculum and is now a specialization under the International Economics concentration.

Pondering higher finance

Why? Because finance plays a key role in the global economy, influencing development, environmental management and myriad other issues of interest to SAISers.

What does the Club do? Answer: Lunch & Learns, Field Trips (including a visit to the Ducati factory), meetings with alumni in finance, tailored career services sessions, online stock market games.

Our members explore what finance means in the real word and get a sense of how learning about finance might change their perspective or future career path. The real draw is that we’re able to provide opportunities that just don’t fit into a Finance class.

Prof. Roger Leeds

The Finance Club is lucky to have the support of Prof. Roger Leeds, whose classes make up the Finance foundation for all SAIS Finance students. At our last meeting he was MC for a a showing of the movie “Inside Job”. Nearly 50 students attended (not in the least lured by pizza and beer). The movie, based on the 2008 financial crisis, was followed by a Q&A session with Prof. Leeds.

The Q&A lasted until the school closed for the night -- and then continued at a local osteria.

We plan to join the Finance Club in DC, and we hope the next group of bolognesi continue the tradition in SAIS Bologna. I mean, why not? Ridiculously popular, lots of fun, and incredibly informative.

Who could resist?

Larissa Muir (BC'12)

"Snug as a bug in a rug"

Students pick up stakes to come study at SAIS Bologna. All eventually find housing. Not all end up featured on television as they search for a roof over their heads.

Michael Anderson; his wife, Paige Crosland Anderson, and their toddler daughter, Ada, moved from Utah to Bologna in September to start a new life.

Their transition from suburban life in the United States to a medieval city in Italy was captured by House Hunters International, a travel program that shows home buyers around the world.

"It was really, really fun," Paige said of the experience of being filmed as she and Michael juggled different options before choosing their apartment. "It was an experience to remember for sure."

Paige & Kirsten
in front of their mural

HGTV found the young couple through Paige's blog. Michael, Paige and Ada were then filmed and recorded as they made the rounds of Bologna before the start of classes last autumn.

They ruled out one apartment with a lovely view and a second with two bathrooms and a dishwasher before settling on a smaller flat with a garden out back.

"I think the small space is doable," Paige says on the show. "And you know what? If we're on top of each other a little bit, so what? We came to Italy to grow closer as a family."

Michael had worked in a tech company in Utah before starting his studies at SAIS Bologna. Paige had finished her undergraduate studies before giving birth to Ada, who was seven months when they moved to Italy.

You may remember Paige as the artist who along with Kirsten Hansen painted the mural in the Bologna Admissions Office.

Here is a condensed version of the HGTV show:



For those reading this on email, here is the video.

Nelson Graves

Not so trivial pursuits

Who said this:

"If you are asked to play the Chicken Game and decline the invitation, you have just played -- and lost."

That was one of the questions that contestants tackled last week at the first SAIS Bologna Trivia Night.

The Strategic Studies Career Club hosted the event at Giulio’s Bar to raise funds for their coming trip to Brussels to meet NATO officials and SAIS alumni.

To encourage the 13 teams to adopt a "strategic” outlook, questions went well beyond the typical pub trivia fare of science, history, pop culture and sports. Instead, this contest focused on the academic concentrations offered at SAIS.

Dirty Larry

Fourteen professors offered trivia questions related to their fields of expertise. Questions covered the entire spectrum of SAIS concentrations. There were three rounds of nine questions each, with a bonus question at the end of each round.

Here's a question from Prof. Arntraud Hartmann (International Development):

"Which country produced the architect of the Human Development Indicator?"

From Çiğdem Akın (Economics):

"What term in international monetary economics describes a country that is unable to borrow abroad in its own currency?"

The question on the Chicken Game came from Prof. Marco Cesa (International Relations).

Because the questions were so challenging, professors provided hints that teams could purchase to improve their chances of answering correctly.

The winning team, Dirty Larry, proved its superior trivia knowledge, missing only four questions and getting the three bonus questions correct for a final score of 133 points.

The second place team, Los Banditos, put up an impressive fight, trailing Dirty Larry by 32 points.

Regardless of the point spread, spirits were high as the SAIS Bologna community spent an entertaining and enlightening evening together. Students look forward to the next BC trivia night and their chance to become the next SAIS trivia champions.

Rebecca Dash (BC12)