Weeknotes - 2025-W16
Cover image for 2025-W16
This weeknote was originally supposed to go out on the 20th of April 2025. But because there was a lot of things going on, I couldn’t publish it then. So I’m writing this on 24th, but will include things only as of 20th, just so we can keep it all “together”. So the rest of the post will read as if I wrote it on 20th.
This week was one of the most hectic weeks in the recent past, I think. It was the last 7 days I had before I had to submit my assignment for GCPP. We had to either choose between writing a policy brief for a problem statement OR to analyze a policy that was already made. I choose to write a brief, because I wanted to learn how to do it thoroughly (this was the same kind of thing we did during the workshop as well).
It was hard. The lessons taught us to work through an 8 step process and doing the first two of those, took me almost a week, working every night from 9PM - 12:30 - 1:00AM. Gathering evidence, even in the world of AI - isn’t an easy task, I’ve come to realize. Because I still needed to vet each one of those things, to see if the bubbled up evidence, makes sense to the problem statement that I had chosen.
So in this week, I had to do the remaining 6 steps. And those were even more difficult than the first 3. The great part of the topic that we were given was that I could talk to dear friends who the policy brief would affect. In fact the things they said, even made it into the final paper 🙂.
Even this week was a lot of late night sessions with Paper Boat’s Zero, Bonomi’s summer brews, and the company of a batch mate who has ended up becoming a very nice friend through this course. Even though I took a LOT of time to work through the primary 6 out of the 8 steps of the process, I think that it helped as I was putting it all together when writing the paper. The information flowed better because I had done the hard work, in a different place.
Both Saturday and Sunday were quite long days too, with me just taking bio breaks where required. Both these days, I spent a lot of time on telling the story I wanted to, in the policy paper. It was a hard and long 2 days which had a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of rephrasing and lot of reviewing.
In addition I had to write 2 blog posts for some extra credit but I could end up writing only one of these. And I wrote it based on an experience that I had. It was about a concept in economics: information asymmetry.
I think I have come out of this, with a high level of humility towards the policy making process. The green field of public policy is vast and dotted with the efforts of previous policy makers - some which have yielded great results, some not so great. To make things even more complex, sometimes the field next to us, look like they are solving the same class of problems, but we can’t borrow it because our soil, our air and our water are different.
I’ve finished the entire content of the paper and I will use tomorrow, the 21st, as the ‘fine tuning’ day - fixing up spellings, polishing the edges and making the cover pages. The submission is due by 21st of April 2025 23:59.
It has been a wonderful journey till now, and I look forward to the paths that it opens up for me in the future.