John Foote is a visiting lecturer in the College of Human Ecology and teaches the Infrastructure Finance course in the Spring targeted at CIPA students. He’s here today to provide an insight into MPA Science, Technology, and Infrastructure concentration. John can be reached at jhf25@cornell.edu with any questions.
You know a topic is hot (and important) when John Oliver devotes 20 minutes on his Last Week Tonight show discussing it in depth. That’s the takeaway when Oliver tackled the topic of infrastructure last year. More than 6 million views later, infrastructure, and the way we plan, finance, build and manage it, is now part of the zeitgeist.
Infrastructure is a growing field that is looking for new talent with an array of management skills. This is one of the reasons that CIPA added “infrastructure” to its science and technology concentration. Cornell, since its founding, is a place where the study of infrastructure is central to its mission. Cornell engineers, planners, economists and political scientists are working on almost every aspect of infrastructure. There are few places in the country that are better suited to train the next generation of infrastructure leaders.
CIPA’s MPA degree with a science, technology and infrastructure concentration is where all of this comes together. The MPA program allows students to obtain a solid grounding in the policy, financial and management aspects of infrastructure and then build on this foundation with courses with an engineering, planning, and/or business flavor.
John Oliver defined infrastructure as “anything that can be destroyed in an action movie”. With a Cornell MPA you can be an action hero on the other side—fixing our very real infrastructure problems.
If you are interested in infrastructure studies at Cornell, send me an email.