Inspired #7 - Group Project

Working on this group project has definitely been an interesting, rewarding and tiring experience. Every Sunday we were in the IST building for 2-3 hours at a time to write at least 500 words. The final Sunday we spent 8 hours finishing our paper. All the time spent was definitely worth it as we had a sense of accomplishment when we finally turned in the paper. The highlight of the project definitely had to be when we found out we discovered that we were only required to write at least 5,000 words not the 10,000 we thought. 

Going into this project, I only had a rudimentary understanding of the Mexican drug cartels. I knew that they were growing in that power and that they were causing major problems within in Mexico. After this project however, I have a much better understanding of the severity of the problems in Mexico. The cartels effectively own North Mexico and are slowly unraveling Mexican sovereignty. It will not be long before Mexico is a failed-state as the government is unable to combat the cartels.

One of the issues that we struggled with throughout the project was the constraints of the assignment for our topic. For the assignment, we were to discuss only the international policies associated with our topic. For our topic, this proved difficult, as significant reforms are needed domestically if we wish to combat the threat of the cartels. During the presentation, we found ourselves in the awkward position as the judges absolutely hammered us on failing to address domestic issues in our policy presentation. Without coming out and outright saying that we could not address those issues, it was difficult to answer the questions. The difficult questions did teach me an important going into the future; never fail to address the obvious solution. 

This policy project, definitely gave us insight into what actually happens at thinks tanks like the Center for Strategic and International solutions. Think tasks work to solve the difficult questions that do not have a simple solution. If the easy solutions existed, policy makers would not think tanks to help solve the problems. I wish that Scott had been able to come up from CSIS to give us his impressions on our project from the think tanks perspective. Unfortunately, he had another appointment and was unable to make it up to Penn State to listen to our presentations.

In conclusion, this project was definitely worth the amount of work that our group put in over the last parts of the semester. It is was interesting to look at how far we had come as a group from the first problem identification portion that we turned in that first week. Since that first week, we identified the issue and created a reasonable international solution to combat the drug cartels. While we should have at least identified the obvious domestic solutions, we created a potential solution internationally that can help Mexico in the long run. The experiences gained this semester will be beneficial going into the future as I explore potential careers in the field of public policy.