NEED Activities

Rather than duplicate your policy school's own set of recruitment events for development-focused jobs and internships, we want to create additional opportunities specifically tailored to students with a strong interest in evidence-based dev. We will leverage the collective size and enthusiasm of our membership, demonstrating to hiring organizations that investing extra effort into a NEED-hosted session is well worth their time.

These enhanced opportunities include:

🔎 Searching wider: Convening panels of less-known, high impact organizations that may lack the capacity to visit each policy school individually.

🥽 Diving deeper: Hosting sessions with established organizations, designed to move beyond the standard recruitment pitch. While we welcome input on how to make these sessions most valuable, our current vision includes: conversations with CEOs or founders, walkthroughs of technical interview tasks, panels featuring employees at different levels discussing their day-to-day roles, and case-based explorations of how the organization approaches impact and what skills are most critical for success.

As professional school students, gaining hands-on, relevant experience is essential. To support this, we are partnering with organizations that connect students to real-world, action-oriented challenges for capstone and thesis projects. In parallel, we are exploring pro bono consulting opportunities with high-impact development organizations, allowing students to contribute meaningfully while learning practical skills.

Programming includes: 

✍️ Designing for impact: Collaborating with groups like Effective Thesis to help students design capstone and thesis projects that align with the priorities of hiring organizations—demonstrating their value as job candidates while contributing to real-world challenges faced by these organizations.

👷 Sourcing real projects: Creating cross-school pro bono consulting teams, enabling policy students to build relevant experience and strengthen their resumes while supporting the capacity of development organizations that—based on rigorous evidence—are highly effective in improving global well-being.

Development is an inherently collaborative venture. While each policy school has its own distinctive community, we represent a broader, like-minded body of students who will one day work together closely—on the same projects, for the same organizations, or within the same ecosystems. By strengthening cross-school solidarity—especially at a moment when sector-wide shocks have made it more difficult for development professionals to engage with students—we can support each other and the future of our field. 

These efforts include:

🚅 Convening in-person meetups: Gathering in major US cities close to a critical mass of our students (NY, Boston, and DC).

🤵🏻‍♀️ Organizing joint delegations: Attending major dev-related events or conferences (summits by World Bank, HKS CID, UN, EA Global, etc).

Evidence-based development practitioners rely on learnings from both inside and outside of the classroom. In addition to supporting students through academic projects (thesis or capstone) and pro bono consulting, NEED facilitates inquiry and discussion around topics relevant to evidence-based development.

This programming includes:

🎤 Running a virtual speaker series:  Hosting leading experts, leveraging NEED's size, connections, and mission to secure speakers who may not typically appear in programming at individual policy schools. These sessions will prioritize Q&A segments to foster direct, meaningful interaction between students and speakers.

🗣️ Hosting virtual discussion groups: Providing a platform for students to form topic-based virtual discussion groups around shared niches of interest. These smaller, student-led communities will be shaped by member demand and supported by NEED in assessing interest and setting up logistics. Some initial ideas are:

• • • • How to promote evidence-based decision making in specific countries or regions

      • The pitfalls of strictly quantitive approaches to assessing program effectiveness 

      • The merits of the "effective altruism" approach to development

      • How the dev community can better raise private capital from high net worth individuals

      • Political obstacles to making policy based on evidence