Joanne Chung ’26 accepted into 2025 Public Policy International Affairs Fellowship

Winter and spring at Carleton make up an annual season of fellowship acceptance news — and this term, one Carl added a new program to the list! 

Joanne Chung ’26 has been accepted into the 2025 Public Policy International Affairs (PPIA) Junior Summer Institute at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She will be the first Carleton student to participate in this program, and sat down with me to speak about the process and what she hopes to get out of the experience. She is double-majoring in political science/international relations and economics at Carleton, with an interest in learning more about public policy.

Chung found PPIA while searching for opportunities on Carleton’s Office of Student Fellowships website, and thought it would be a good fit for her current interests in addition to helping her think about her path after Carleton.

“As a first-generation student,” she said, “I’m unclear what public policy might look like in higher education, so I think that the PPIA program would be a good way to test that out and think about graduate school.” 

Chung is most excited about the exploratory aspect of this fellowship, explaining that she is interested in many different types of domestic policy right now and isn’t sure yet where she wants to focus. 

“I want to narrow down to a specific field, but I still need to do that narrowing down,” she said. “[This fellowship] will permit me to have the time to explore a topic more in-depth than I would on my own time as an undergraduate.” 

The six-week PPIA program features graduate-level coursework in statistics, economics, and policy, all pertaining to public policy. After its conclusion, Chung will receive an evaluation and a stipend, which she can use for a master’s in public policy if attending one of the 60+ institutions connected with the PPIA program. The consortium includes Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan.

A significant part of what drew Chung to public policy came from experiences she had in Carleton classrooms. She explained the importance she places on discourse during class discussions, and how she wants to continue to be in spaces that allow her to contribute to that. She identified two courses that stood out to her — AMST 225: Beauty and Race in America and POSC 265: Public Policy and Global Capitalism. 

Beauty and Race in America was Chung’s first course that employed “discourse-based teaching,” which she really enjoyed; it made her want to take more discussion-centered courses. 

“It was so refreshing to take, because I had primarily done STEM and introductory language courses previously,” she said. 

Public Policy and Global Capitalism had a similar effect, but narrowed her focus to the realm of policy, enabling her to “develop a larger understanding of the frameworks in which policy is developed and understood.” 

“A lot of the conversations I’ve had with peers inside and outside the classroom… [have] turned into bigger conversations about systems and institutions,” she said. “That’s what attracted me to public policy. Finding the roots in systemic issues and trying to address them, whether through policy research or legislative enactments, is what I’m most interested in. This fellowship fits perfectly with that.”