For nearly three decades, the policy workshop has been a cornerstone of the graduate program in public affairs at Princeton University. Building on the analytical skills acquired in the first year, the workshops are designed to help students strengthen skills like collaboration and consensus building that are not typically taught in academic settings.

“When you work on policy, it’s less about the individual and more about bringing people together from different groups. That’s why public policy is so hard,” said Eduardo Bhatia, the John L Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and a visiting lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

What that looks like was evident on a recent morning in Bhatia’s workshop, which focused on conservation and local governance in Kenya. Students had just returned from a site visit to the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya and were debating how to position their final report. Their interests and backgrounds varied widely, from urban development to climate policy, and that came through as they tried to reach a consensus.

Bhatia, who interjected only occasionally to steer the group based on his experience teaching these workshops for five years, remarked, “No paper they’ve done in their lives has been with eight other people. And that intense give and take is one of the most important lessons of the required workshop.”

The workshops offered vary every year, based on the policy issues of the moment, student interest and faculty expertise, and the needs of real-world clients — such as government agencies, multilateral organizations, or nonprofits — whose challenges serve as the basis for the courses. This fall, topics ranged from U.S.-Egypt foreign relations to the role states are playing in U.S. healthcare.

What’s consistent is the immersive, team-based experience that blends rigorous analysis with field research and real impact. 

“It's one thing to study policy in the classroom. But to visit a client, interview stakeholders, and experience how the dynamics we've studied throughout the MPA curriculum play out in the real world—and in a new policy context—has been invaluable,” said Dylan Nezaj MPA ’26, who is in the Kenya workshop taught by Bhatia.

Students present their findings and recommendations by semester’s end.

“Students aren’t just writing research papers,” said Karen McGuinness, associate dean for graduate education. “They’re working in teams, engaging stakeholders, and producing client-ready reports that reflect the complexity of policymaking.”

The student work has real impact. Heather Howard, a professor of the practice at Princeton SPIA and director of State Health and Value Strategies, has taught more than a dozen policy workshops.

In Fall 2018, the Washington State legislature asked students who were researching the public option for healthcare to fast-track publication of their final report so those findings could be used in legislative deliberations on the structure of the public option. The bill passed and included a number of policies recommended by the report.

The state of Arizona also used a policy workshop report to help implement their Medicaid waiver, and portions of a report on the Affordable Care Act in Minnesota were incorporated into a report from the state to its legislature.

“The policy workshop is a highlight of the MPA academic program,” Howard said. “It allows students to merge the learnings from SPIA's core courses, their previous experience, and the varied viewpoints that students bring to the program into a true practical experience.”

The impact on students is also often long-lasting. Richard Johnson MPA ’06 credits his policy workshop on nuclear nonproliferation issues for sparking an interest in that topic. He served in the Department of Defense as deputy assistant secretary on nuclear and weapons of mass destruction policy.

“Because of that workshop, as well as other courses I took at SPIA, I was able to secure a role as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of State supporting nuclear negotiations with North Korea,” Johnson said. “The rest of my career that followed built on that policy workshop.”

Photo: Policy workshop group at Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya.