Global Consultants: Policymaking for Social Impact

The Common Core will be facilitating an undergraduate policy consultancy as a co-curricular programme in collaboration with the University of Birmingham (UoB) in the UK, from 10 February to 24 March 2023 (6 weeks).

Student teams from UoB’s LANS (Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences) From Research To Policy II course will help formulate policy for a social issue important to the Birmingham area, which involves conducting a research process–articulating a problem, ideating a solution, devising a methodology, collecting data, and analysis, discussion and presentation.

Social policies explored includes drug addiction, food security, homelessness, gang violence, obesity, grooming and trafficking, and gender and disability inequality issues.

HKU undergraduate students will work in groups to provide feedback for the UoB student projects about how their projects might be enhanced by additional perspectives from Hong Kong and Asia. As part of this work, HKU students will be introduced to social policy analysis, practice applying basic analytical frameworks to case studies, and interact with peers and the UoB students.

Student will learn and experiment with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) applications to assist in developing their consulting skills.

Students must be available to attend the following online sessions:

Fri 10 Feb 2023, 1:30 pm – 2:20 pm
Fri 10 Mar 2023, 1:30 pm – 2:20 pm

The project requires at least 20 hours of total work. Students are eligible to earn a certificate and apply for one (1) non-graduating academic credit through HKU Horizons (The credit is transcriptable but does not count towards your GPA). The total hours include all time spent in workshops, meetings, self-study, assignment preparation, and final presentation.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the project coordinator Dr Jack Tsao (jtsao@hku.hk).